Symptoms

A little over a week ago, I got a call at the office around 10AM. It was my mother. It went like this.

“I’ve been having pain between my shoulder blades, and when I try to get up and do anything I get out of breath.”

I’m the family doctor-before-the-doctor, having done my Ph.D. work at Duke Medical School in the 80′s and absorbed a lot of medicine in the 70′s. This instantly sounded cardiac to me, and I responded “How long has this been going on, Mom?”

“Four days.”

I was, shall we say, nonplussed. Skipping over a fair bit of drama, by 6PM Mom was in the Cardiac Care Unit at St Joseph’s Hospital in Denver being treated for congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema, largely brought on by spending four days following a (thankfully very minor) heart attack by not telling anyone about it. (She’s home now, in pretty good shape for a little old lady after a heart attack, and I’ll be writing a separate piece on women’s heart attacks and how they’re not like men’s.)

In today’s PJ, Roger Kimball writes, in passing, of his recent bout of appendicitis. He notes that his “free and frank discussion” with the emergency room physician didn’t commence until the appendix had already ruptured. While Roger doesn’t mention the technical details, the fact that it had ruptured meant that its removal was rather more complicated than had it not ruptured, his recovery was prolonged and the risk of major complications much increased. Again, he’s home and working again following his (thankfully uncomplicated) recovery.

One of the first things I told my mother in the CCU was that she was under strict instructions now: if she had another heart attack, she was not to wait four days to tell anyone. While, failing an anatomical wonder, Roger Kimball is unlikely to ever again be faced with appendicitis, there is still a lesson here that delaying too much when you have a lower-right quadrant stomachache is also ill-advised.

In general, ignoring symptoms and hoping they’ll just go away doesn’t pay off very well.

In today’s Clarice’s Pieces at American Thinker, Clarice Feldman tells another story: about the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), which claimed Iran had no nuclear weapons program. This NIE was used by the Democrats in the election campaign to paint the Bush Administration as bloodthirsty warmongers; its authors were variously rewarded with promotion by the Obama Administration and prestigious academic appointments.

The only problem being that the NIE was utterly and completely wrong, as everyone — even the UN IAEA — now recognizes. That NIE was, however, the basis for initial attempts by the Obama Administration to “gentle” the Iranians into better compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Now, it’s been three years, and we know that the Iranians have made significant progress; what’s more, having seen the press coverage of the 2007 NIE, they’re engaged in hardening their nuclear facilities by spreading them throughout the country and placing them in deeply-buried bunkers.

Of course, there’s (thankfully) no analogy to be drawn here.

Birthday Quote of the Day

“We are star stuff contemplating star stuff.” — Carl Sagan (1934-Nov-11 — 1996-Dec-29)

Political Theory Quote of the Day

“Remember: If the government is underhanded and incompetent, that means the government must exert more control over your life.”

– Jim Treacher

US Warming Cooling Dramatically in Last Decade, NOAA Data Shows

I don’t have time to write a full piece on this right now, but Anthony Watts has a good post up: basically NOAA’s data shows very significant cooling over the last ten years in the continental US.  This is very hard to reconcile with the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis.

Update

Consistent with this, the Arctic sea ice extent is growing about 40 percent faster than normal this year, indicating extended polar cold.

Firefighters Down.

Wheels-Up Landing in a Boeing 767

Dorothy Howell Rodham, Mother of Hilary Rodham Clinton, passes at 92

Story at MSNBC.

I think I can speak for everyone in saying that we at PJ Media extend our sympathies.

Quote of the Day

To be white in America is to have the privilege of being able to go through life without being made self-conscious by one’s race. — James Taranto in the WSJ

This one struck me particularly. As some readers have seen me mention, I’m descended from both Cherokee and Choctaw Indians. Now, I look about as Indian as Leonard Nimoy, and a helluva lot less than Ed Ames, and where I grew up the big racial issue was Anglo or Hispanic anyway. (And I’m a crossover there too, for that matter.)

But my closest friend since childhood is an Indian of the Other Kind, from Hyderabad, and one of my closest adult friends is a black guy from Kentucky. Both of them were made conscious, on a regular basis, that they weren’t among the melanin-challenged.

The way young people now are made conscious of their physiological difference is different from when I was a child, and even more so from when my parents were children — my mother didn’t discover her Indian ancestry until she was in her twenties, because her family was “passing”, where now you have poseurs like my erstwhile colleague Ward Churchill. It was a positive for him in academia. Something, in fact, I experienced myself in my academic career. When I was approaching my dissertation defense and looking at academic jobs, I had the experience of moving from just another CV in hundreds, to being actively recruited, after the department chairman learned by accident of my Injun blood. I resented it: they weren’t interested in me and my research, they were interested in who I’d picked for grandparents.

Taranto is making the point in his column that people with the appropriate ancestry now are made to feel different, not by the exclusion, but by the degree to which inclusion is granted, not earned.

My Sexual Harassment Reprimand

Back in the early 90′s, I was teaching at Durham Technical Community College while I was in grad school.

One day, one of my students, who normally wore sweats and jeans — as I did — came in wearing hose and heels, a cute denim skirt, and a white-and-aqua sweater with silver threads in it.

I said “Nice outfit!  That’s a pretty sweater.”

The next day, I was seeing the Dean in Charge of Spanking Lecturers.  Seems I’d said “something offensive”.  She couldn’t tell me who had complained so I could apologize, what I’d said, as that might identify who had complained, but that I’d better apologize tout suite and I’d better watch myself.

Remember that when you hear about Herman Cain.

‘Oh Wow! Oh Wow!’

Steve Jobs’ last words.

There’s a nice piece in the WSJ blogs on this too. (H/T to Aaron.)

Scenes from the Occupation

PJM contributor Mark Stuertz passes along this video from Dallas.

Dramatic and Unexpected Explosions on Uranus

Honest.

Another food fight breaks out in climate science.

(Updated to recover from the deleterious effects of posting at midnight after a long day.)

(Updated even more to include this link to Curry on her own web site reacting to the Daily Mail story.  She’s not happy with the headline, among other things. See at the end of the article.)

One reason I’ve been more slack about the details of current climate science controversies than I was is that I’m frankly tired of the whole thing. It’s predictable: the simplest climate post is immediately followed by the following comments from someone.

The consensus of climate science agrees that global warming is being caused by human emission of CO2. Now, the real answer to that one, frankly, is “So what?” Science isn’t established by consensus, and the number of scientific theories established by consensus that later dissolved under experimentation ranges from Aristotle’s ideas about falling bodies (obviously, heavier objects fall faster, right?) to quasicrystals — which got Danny Schechtmann dismissed as a crackpot 20 years ago and got him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry this year.  This is the classical fallacy of argumentum ad populum, and the fact that it has a Latin name tells you how long it’s been recognized as a fallacy.    (This is often followed by the argumentum ad baculum, appeal to force: if you keep saying that we’ll beat you up/you won’t get tenure/you should be treated as a war criminal and executed. Those don’t show up very often here at PJM, but don’t doubt I can find you examples, here and elsewhere.)

That’s usually matched with the favorite unscientific “skeptic” answers: No one has proven there’s any such thing as a greenhouse effect and the notion of a global average surface temperature isn’t even well-defined.  Both of these really come down to “I don’t believe in thermodynamics at even the most basic level.”  ”Scientific fact” is different in a very basic way from facts like “2+2=4″, but the basic idea of a greenhouse effect is awfully well confirmed.  Among other things, it’s easy enough to calculate that the Earth’s “natural temperature” without the greenhouse effect provided by water, methane, CO2 and other greenhouse gases would be something like -33°C.  If you’ve ever seen a lake or an ocean with liquid water, you have experimental confirmation of a greenhouse effect.  A slightly more sophisticated version of that is the one about there not having been significant warming in the last 200 or 1000 years; again, sorry.  In the 17th and 18th centuries, the Thames river regularly froze over. It has been warming.  What we aren’t as sure of is precisely how much. In 200 CE there were wine grapes being grown in northern England, and about 1000 CE bread grains were being grown successfully in Greenland: it is really warmer than it was then?  Doesn’t look like it — but that makes trouble for the idea that we’re warming unusually.

The global average surface temperature (GAST) objection makes at least a little more sense: it’s almost true. Since we can’t put a thermometer on every infinitestimal spot on Earth and take its temperature continuously, we’re inevitably making an approximation.  But that just means we can’t take the GAST precisely.  When a bunch of thermometers are averaged together, the resulting number is a temperature, and along with it (although this is often ignored) we can make an estimate of how much error there may be.  There’s a major, active subtopic of mathematics called “statistics” that’s concerned with how to deal with that kind of uncertainty, its error bounds and so forth.  But think of it like when you take a child’s temperature: maybe at the mouth it’s 99°F while at the other end it’s 100.1°F.  You don’t claim that means taking a child’s temperature is “not well defined.”  You just know it’s somewhere in that neighborhood, and you don’t worry that a boy child’s testicles are usually cooler than his pancreas.

And, of course, there’s the usual run of people who say skeptics are “in the pay of Big Oil”, “brainwashed by Fox News”, or simply “denialists” with arch connections made to Holocaust denial. The interested student is encouraged to consult a list of classical rhetorical fallacies for the Latin names for those; I promise you’ll find them all.

Perhaps the most annoying to me are the people who say The University of East Anglia cleared the scientists involved. It’s more precise to say UEA whitewashed the scientists involved; anyone who actually read the files and emails saw there was a lengthy effort to suppress opposing ideas and coerce journal editors.

For all of that, there are real, serious attempts being made to get the science right.  I wrote about the preliminary results in one such case here: the Berkeley Earth Project reported that they were preparing four papers, one of which confirmed that there had been a general rise in global average earth-surface temperature over the last 200 years.  The actual papers hadn’t been peer-reviewed or published, and it was, ahem, very unusual for the results to be pushed by press release before a paper had even been accepted.  If a climate skeptic had done that, the derision would have been general, and would have included remarks about pseudoscience and muttered comments about cold fusion.  Still, the paper itself was decent — it has a number of statistical flaws (finding that kind of thing is what peer review is for) and the results weren’t really all that dramatic — the general response was “well, duh!”  It was the PR that was flawed.

Unfortunately, it’s beginning to look more and more like the PR effort was the point. Dr Judith Curry, who chairs the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology and is second author on these very papers, has now gone public in an interview in the Daily Mail (UK).  The story, entitled “Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague” starts with:

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.

Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.

[That's much stronger than the actual papers justified, as we noted here when they first came out, but a good summary of the way the results were reported in the press.]

The story goes on:

It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.

The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.

Especially well suited for lightsaber training.

From the Japanese Ministry of Defense.

Fun to Watch on So Many Levels

Watch Veena Malik kick some Pakistani mufti’s metaphorical ass.

College Loan Deal: Worse Than You Think

Bryan’s post, and the article it quotes, are understating the problem with Obama’s scheme, thanks to the magic of compound interest.  Let’s take little Suzy with her $212,000.  She takes a job at some appropriately socially-oriented inner-city public-service social worker position, and as a result only has 14,110  per year; we take 10 percent of that as her annual payment.  Current student loans are apparently at 8 percent.  So, her first year, she pays $1,411 against her loan — which cost $16,960 in interest. That’s about $15,549 over her payments.

Under the current terms of these loans, that excess is added to the principal. So, next year, we’re talking about the $212,000 principal, plus$15,549 added.  This is what people in the subprime mortgage business called “reverse amortization”.  Using the wonders of technology, I put that in a spreadsheet (see below).  The outcome is that really, when the loan is forgiven after 20 years, the total loss to the Government is $923,553, which is, not to put too fine a point on it, almost a million dollars!

Spreadsheet:

Hurricane Rina from Space

Briggs on the BEST Climate Data

William M. Briggs, often contributor to PJM, has a post on his own blog about the Berkeley Earth Project’s BEST data, that was announced last week.  He’s kindly allowed us to reprint it here.

What BEST Means and What It Doesn’t

Temperature Changes

BEST has confirmed what everybody—and I mean everybody—already believed: that temperature changes. BEST has not—I repeat not; I repeat it in bold: not; I repeat it in italics: not—proved why the temperature has changed.

That is, BEST has not given any evidence that the temperatures changes because a particular theory of anthropogenic global warming is true. Nor has it proven that any AGW theory is false. BEST says nothing one way or another. As in nothing. As is not one thing. As in it remains mute. As in AGW is not confirmed nor discomfirmed by BEST. As in the debate is not over.

BEST believes that, over the past two centuries, the temperature went up in about two-thirds of all land-based stations. BEST also believes, and has so stated, that the temperature went down in about one-third of all land-based stations. As in decreased. As in became cooler. As in, it is no so that everywhere became hotter.

BEST has said nothing about temperature changes over most of the EARTH’s surface, which is to say, the oceans. As in BEST had nothing to say about most of the planet. And BEST has confined itself to a very brief period of time.

Uncertainty in BEST

Did you not know that BEST has not claimed absolute certainty in their results? It is true that many stories in the press have hinted at perfection, but these stories are the creation of reporters who are either (a) ignorant of math and meteorology, or (b) who desire certainty where none exists, because certainty is consonant with their political beliefs.

BEST provided point and uncertainty estimates of (an operationally defined) global average temperature. Most agree that the point estimate is “in there”, plus or minus, in the ballpark. BEST admits that its estimates may be refined, as in changed, as in moved to different numbers.

Even using BEST’s own estimates of uncertainty, we are only confident of change over the past century or so. As in even BEST themselves say they are far less certain what happened before about 1900.

BEST’s estimates of uncertainty are too narrow. That is, BEST is too sure of themselves. By how much they are uncertain, there is disagreement. There is strong evidence that their certainty is off by at least a factor of two.

That is, BEST should at least double its uncertainty, which means we should have even less confidence in what happened in the past. Which means we are still unsure—we may always be unsure—exactly what the temperature was prior to about 1940. We may be sure what it was at a few individual land stations, but we will probably remain unsure what the temperature was averaged over all land surfaces. This is likely a case of scientific tough luck. If only our ancestors had thought to measure temperature most assiduously, we wouldn’t be in this boat.

Peer Review

BEST has not been peer-reviewed. And incidentally, peer-review is the weakest filter of truth science has.

Let’s repeat that. BEST announced its results via press conference, press release, and blog. Just in the way that we always hear is shocking, anathema, horrifying, suspicious, wrong, worthy of being denounced, and so forth.

Peers (like your author) have released critiques of BEST in the same way that BEST announced their own results.

It is a fallacy, and a stupid one, to say that because a peer has not reviewed a claim (according to the procedure laid down by some editor), or that because a claim has not appeared in the pages of some journal, then that claim is therefore false or cannot be believed.

If this were not a fallacy, then the comments you are now making in support of (or in the criticism of) BEST are also false, because your comments have not been reviewed by scientist peers.

Motivation

It is again a fallacy, and an asinine one, to claim that those who make up BEST, or those who criticize it, have this or that “agenda”, or “history”, or this or that political or religious or philosophical belief, and that because of these antecedents the claims of BEST are therefore true (or false).

Again, if it were not a fallacy, then the comments you are not making are subject to the same failing.

Every argument must be judged on its own merits.

(See also my “Watch Out for Science Reporting” piece“, Briggs’ technical review on the BEST release [warning: there is math], Doug Keenan’s similar critique [more math], Willis Eschenbach’s critique [here too], Anthony Watts’ initial response, and Judith Curry’s original discussion on the release..)

Climate Science Quote of the Day

Roger Pielke, Jr:

Climate science — or at least some parts of it — seems to have devolved into an effort to generate media coverage and talking points for blogs, at the expense of actually adding to our scientific knowledge of the climate system

Rubio Answers the Washington Post

Here:

If The Washington Post wants to criticize me for getting a few dates wrong, I accept that. But to call into question the central and defining event of my parents’ young lives – the fact that a brutal communist dictator took control of their homeland and they were never able to return – is something I will not tolerate.

Read the whole thing.

Biden’s Four Pinocchios

The Washington Post nails the Administration. Again.

The Pinocchio Test

Biden, when he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1994, was author of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the largest crime bill in U.S. history. On the face of it, a threefold increase in rape in two years—when other violent crime statistics show relatively modest increases in the same city—should raise serious questions for anyone knowledgeable about crime or statistics. Clearly, the city of Flint supplied bad data, and either Biden or someone in Biden’s office should have caught it.

In any case, the vice president should know better than to spout off half-baked facts in service of a dubious argument. Even if one believes there is a link between crime and the number of police—which is debatable and subject to many caveats—there is no excuse to make the dramatic claim that more people will die or be raped without additional funds for police. When making such a breathtaking charge, you had better have your facts straight.

Get the Facts

What are the facts? Again and again and again — what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what “the stars foretell”, avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable “verdict of history” — what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts! — Robert A Heinlein

Watch Out for Science Reporting

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project today released some information about their research.  Judith Curry, one of the co-authors, reports this here.  The BBC has a story here, and the Economist reports it here.

These stories both play out as “the CO2-forced AGW model is confirmed,” which is a whole lot stronger than the actual results.

The BEP papers say that by re-analyzing existing temperature records, they get a close match to  other temperature analyses of global average surface temperature for the last 200 or so years.  This isn’t a big surprise: that fits what Wegman and others reported — agreement on warming over the last 400 years, but less clarity on temperatures 1000 years ago or more.

This is not in itself a confirmation of AGW.

I know I’ve said this before, but let’s just repeat: to confirm the CO2-forced AGW hypothesis, you need several steps:

• There must have been warming.
• That warming must be unusual.
• There must be a mechanism proposed for that unusual warming, and there must be a falsifiable way of confirming that mechanism.
• That mechanism has to be the result of human action.
• That human action has to be unusual release of CO2.

All we have here is confirmation of warming, the first step.  This has been by far the strongest part of this chain and has been for a long time.  It’s already well established — as I’ve said before, we know there’s been warming since the Little Ice Age — that’s how we know it was the Little Ice Age.

There is one fairly unusual aspect to this, that the authors have put on a big PR effort for papers that haven’t been peer-reviewed or published in the formal literature.  Here’s something I wrote on Google+:

You’d be better off reading Judith Curry (one of the co-authors) on her blog: http://judithcurry.com/2011/10/20/berkeley-surface-temperatures-released/#comment-124946

The press embargo on this lifts today at noon Pacific time. I suspect there will be pretty widespread media coverage on this, with both sides of the debate spinning this to suit their purposes. I have had queries from several journalists, to whom I probably did not provide any usable sound bites. Lets see how it plays out.

Roger PIelke Sr wonders about site selection:http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2011/10/20/comment-on-the-article-in-the-economist-on-rich-mullers-data-analysis/

Anthony Watts notes this is a PR press before peer-review, which is unusual: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/20/the-berkeley-earth-surface-temperature-project-puts-pr-before-peer-review/

As I was invited by The Economist to comment publicly, I would recommend rejecting Muller et al in the current form and suggest that it be resubmitted with meaningful and appropriate 30 year comparisons for the same time periods used by the Menne et al and Fall et al cited papers. I would be happy to review the paper again at that time.

I also believe it would be premature and inappropriate to have a news article highlighting the conclusions of this paper until such time meaningful data comparisons are produced and the paper passes peer review. Given the new techniques from BEST, there may be much to gain from a rework of the analysis limited to identical thirty year periods used in Menne et al and Fall et al.

Watts had been asked to review one of the papers, which was a follow-on to the site quality work he’s led over the last several years.  He found some significant errors, and submitted his reviews just a few days ago; those errors weren’t corrected before the PR push.

Lesson: Be cautious about the reporting of a scientific paper that hasn’t been published yet, and be doubly cautious about how a paper is reported when it’s a politically sensitive topic.

Update:

Doug Keenan responds with some technical issues that I think are significant: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/10/21/keenans-response-to-the-best-paper.html

Also, the decadal-oscillations paper makes it clear that an interpretation of their data could imply the human contribution to warming has been overstated.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/21/sceptical-berkeley-scientists-say-human-component-of-global-warming-may-be-somewhat-overstated/#more-49700

Pumpkins

Quote of the Day

I want the people of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the people can be kept by the people, we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty. — Calvin Coolidge (1873-1933), 30th US President

Obama: Will Veto Repeal of CLASS Act I Won’t Enforce

The Hill:

President Obama is against repealing the health law’s long-term care CLASS Act and might veto Republican efforts to do so, an administration official tells The Hill, despite the government’s announcement Friday that the program was dead in the water.

“We do not support repeal,” the official said Monday. “Repealing the CLASS Act isn’t necessary or productive. What we should be doing is working together to address the long-term care challenges we face in this country.”

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced Friday in a blog post on the liberal Huffington Post web site that the administration did not see a way to make the program sustainable. Sebelius indicated her agency hadn’t been able to figure out a way to ensure the program providing long-term care paid for itself as required by law.

Later in a call with reporters on Friday, an HHS official said work on the program was being suspended.

“We won’t be working further to implement the CLASS Act … We don’t see a path forward to be able to do that,” Assistant Secretary for Aging Kathy Greenlee told reporters on Friday.

Over the weekend, The Hill has learned, an administration official called CLASS Act advocates to reassure them that Obama is still committed to making the program work. That official also told advocates that widespread media reports on the program’s demise were wrong, leaving advocates scratching their heads.

 

UN Collusion to Avoid Nasty FOIA

From Chris Horner at Watts Up With That:

CEI has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental accounts, which correspondence a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA. This ‘cloud’ serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

Today’s Quote from Facebook

I think all mixed marriages are problematic. Especially those between men and women. — Mark Nitikman

Quote of the Day

The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can’t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods. — H. L. Mencken

Short Form: I am the 99 percent …

… and if you don’t give us stuff we’ll gang up and take it from you.

Quote of the Day

Do not underestimate the stupidity, incompetence, and ignorance of this Administration regarding the Middle East. — Barry Rubin

Mystery: Forged Signatures in South Bend

Chicago Tribune:

Former Gov. Joe Kernan says a signature on a petition to place Barack Obama‘s name on Indiana’s 2008 primary ballot isn’t his, putting him among dozens of dubious signatures found in a newspaper’s investigation.

Kernan, a Democrat who campaigned for Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary, told the South Bend Tribune that he didn’t sign the Obama document.

Imagine.

South Bend Tribune:

Suspected fake petition pages to place Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the ballot during the 2008 Indiana primary passed through the county voter registration office on days when the Republican head of the office was absent, The Tribune has learned.

The pages in question bear the stamped signature of Republican Linda Silcott, indicating Silcott was not in the office at the time to sign the documents by hand. By comparison, most of the other, non-suspicious pages examined by The Tribune contain Silcott’s written signature. ….

Typically, petition pages in St. Joseph County are signed by hand by both the Republican and Democratic members of the Board of Voter Registration.

In early 2008, however, Silcott missed a number of days of work because of the death of her husband. Consequently, her first deputy, Mary Carrol Ringler, often stamped Silcott’s signature on the pages.

Each of the suspected fake petition pages bears Silcott’s stamped signature, indicating the documents passed through the office on days when she was off.

Though Ringler was the only person permitted to use the stamp, she kept it in an unlocked desk drawer, Silcott said.

In addition, Ringler only began working in voter registration on Jan. 22, 2008. The suspicious petition pages are dated Jan. 28 and 29 and Feb. 4 and 5, within the first two weeks of her arrival.

Ringler told The Tribune Tuesday she could not recall how often she used the stamp during the 2008 primary. “Honestly, I don’t know,” she said. “I know I didn’t do a lot petitions that year because I was brand new.” She said she mainly uses it on purchase orders now.

Pam Brunette’s written signature also appears on the backs of the suspicious petition pages. She is the Democratic member of the Board of Voter Registration.

Brunette did not respond Tuesday to a call seeking comment about the stamped pages. She said last week that voter registration workers “are not handwriting experts, so our job is basically making sure the papers are complete.”

Suddenly, I Feel Better About Huntsman

Jon Huntsman’s daughters (from their twitter account):

Performance Anxiety

I have heard of having sex to forget the stresses of the day, but this seems a bit extreme:

A 54-year-old woman showed up in the emergency room at Georgetown University Hospital with her husband, unable to remember the past 24 hours. Her newer memories were hazy, too. One thing she did recall: Her amnesia had started right after having sex with her husband just an hour before.

While sex can be forgettable or mind-blowing, for some people, it can quite literally be both at the same time. The woman, whose case was reported in the September issue of The Journal of Emergency Medicine, was experiencing transient global amnesia, a rare condition in which memory suddenly, temporarily, disappears.

It certainly sets the bar a little high: if your partner can remember what happened that morning, it wasn’t as mind-blowing as it might have been.

Quote of the day

“Many of us have suspected that economic illiterates were setting the economic policy of this administration,” Golub wrote, adding that [Obama's jobs] bill “reveals a depth of cluelessness that boggles the mind.” — Michael Goodwin, New York Post