All Posts Tagged With: "Age"

Palin Picks Scab From McCain Age Issue.

Tonight Governor Sarah Palin, McCain’s VP pick will have a steep hill to climb to overcome a weekend of very personal nastiness by leftist bloggers and biased media attacks. Negatives have been focused on her (in)experience, McCain age, and whether she is ready to be president.

The Palin pick has forced Barack Obama’s campaign into, as the New York Times put it, “recalibrating their strategies for the presidential campaign - and reconsidering some of their basic assumptions about which states and voters are in play. …”

Voters by a substantial majority think a woman is likely to be elected president of the United States in the next 10 years. Nearly half (48%) think Hillary Clinton is at least somewhat likely to be the one.

While 85% of voters say they are willing to vote for a woman for president nine percent (9%) disagree and seven percent (7%) are undecided. Ironically, men are more willing to vote for a woman president than women voters by an 89% to 81% margin.

If men have their way they prefer Sarah Palin over Clinton 49% to 45% according to a new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey. Women prefer Clinton over Palin 57% to 35% if they were the presidential candidate some think that is because Palin is just too attractive.

Overall 52% has a favorable opinion of Palin and those opinions are sharply split along partisan and racial lines- only 15% of Democrat and blacks say they could vote for Palin.

This survey seems to points away from Palin helping McCain close the 10-12% Obama holds over him among women.

After weeks of running neck-and-neck with McCain in the Rasmussen daily Presidential Tracking Poll, Obama has begun to pull away in recent days. It will take another week or so to determine if the Republican convention can overcome the bounce Obama received from Obama’s convention in Denver. Wednesday morning Obama gets 50% to McCain’s 45% according to Rasmussen’s daily tracking poll.

Prepare for the big chill. Notwithstanding the near hysteria over global warming the earth cooled 0.7C in 2007, the fastest decline in the age of instrumentation, putting us back to where the Earth was in 1930.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman, the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut, and who served as mission specialist on the Apollo 14 lunar mission writes the same solar phenomenon that doomed Napoleon’s army may soon stop Al Gore’s march to glory cold.

The sun goes through a series of 11-year cycles in which sunspots fluctuate in both number and intensity, greatly influencing Earth’s climate and weather. The end of each cycle is called a solar minimum, where sunspot activity is at a low point. Activity usually picks up after that as each new cycle begins. The most recent minimum occurred in March 2007. Sunspot activity should have increased shortly after that but sunspot activity has remained at a virtual standstill.

If you log on to www.spaceweather.com, you will see a current picture of the sun from the U.S. Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) with but a single tiny sunspot, dubbed number 992. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this, according to Chapman, was during what was called the Dalton Minimum, a particularly cold period that lasted several decades starting in 1790. “Northern winters became ferocious,” he says.

Solar researchers report no change in the sun’s magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate another repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth. Were that to continue at that rate for 20-years a drop of 14 degrees Celsius would trigger glaciation and an ice age would return.

Chapman and increasing numbers of other scientist are asking the rhetorical question “What’s wrong with this picture.”