Not at all related to Indiana, but the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a rather amusing editorial hammering on the fact that Senator Rick “Man on Dog” Santorum doesn’t live in Pennsylvania any more.

Before every election, the Post-Gazette routinely sends letters to the candidates seeking material for the Voters Guide. Back in March, as part of that process for the primary, the newspaper sent a letter to Rick Santorum at his home address, at least the one that he claims. Back from Penn Hills came the letter with a sticker from the U.S. Postal Service checked as “Not Deliverable As Addressed — Unable To Forward.”

That is all you need to know about the nasty dispute between the Republican Sen. Santorum and his Democratic opponent, Bob Casey Jr., in the November election. The whole thing is rooted in one inconvenient fact for Sen. Santorum: He doesn’t live here anymore.

The editorial repeats the sentence “He doesn’t live here anymore” at least 4 times.

For those of you who think the existence of the phenomenon of global warming is debatable, Scientific American has an article by Michael Shermer entitled: “The Flipping Point: How the evidence for anthropogenic global warming has converged to cause this environmental skeptic to make a cognitive flip.” (Quite a mouthful.)

Apparently the approach used by the environmental activists had turned him off to their message in the past. His mind was changed by, among other things, a speech by Al Gore which included before-and-after photographs of disappearing glaciers as well as Jared Diamond’s excellent book, Collapse.

He closes with:

According to Flannery, even if we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by 70 percent by 2050, average global temperatures will increase between two and nine degrees by 2100. This rise could lead to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet, which the March 24 issue of Science reports is already shrinking at a rate of 224 ±41 cubic kilometers a year, double the rate measured in 1996 (Los Angeles uses one cubic kilometer of water a year). If it and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melt, sea levels will rise five to 10 meters, displacing half a billion inhabitants.

Because of the complexity of the problem, environmental skepticism was once tenable. No longer. It is time to flip from skepticism to activism.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. Conservatives seem to be backsliding from winning to fighting and now they’re at the part where they get laughed at.

DarkSyde over at Kos has a post chiding the conservatives for having been made the fool by George W. Bush. He opens with:

Yes, my conservative friends, George Bush has sold you down the river. Now, you’re finally starting to suspect that it was never about abortion or limiting government or even national security. Those were just useful emotional distractions held by the left hand so that the right one could deftly rip-off the Federal Treasury and enact measures preventing We the People from interfering with the heist.

He goes on to predict that, by looking the other way on illegal immigration and by granting amnesty, the ranks of the Democratic Party will swell. He concludes:

Here’s the best part of all: While the GOP has gerrymandered themselves into a political strait jacket, most of us on this side of the aisle are OK with some version of the Bush-Kennedy amnesty plan. It’s realistic and moral. But the icing on the cake is that it will hasten the inevitable day when the Republican Party is a permanent minority due to the fastest growing segment of our population becoming eligible to vote for democrats. Although I must admit we never, ever foresaw George Bush as the midwife of progressive ascendancy and the executioner of neo-conservatism. Hasta la vista republicanistas!

My tendency is to think he presumes too much by assuming that immigrants will necessarily be primarily Democrats, but if conservatives are citing the German model of moving the Jews with approval when discussing what might be possible in ridding the U.S. of illegal immigrants.

World Net Daily– [Bush] lied when he said: “Massive deportation of the people here is unrealistic – it’s just not going to work.” Not only will it work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn’t possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don’t speak English and are not integrated into American society.

In order to increase its attractiveness to immigrants who become voters, Republicans are going to have to square the circle and reconcile the racist contingent of their base with the more practical elements and with the sensibilities of immigrants-turned-voters.

Of course, Democrats have their work cut out for them too trying to reconcile the disparate elements of their base in a way that is principled and easily understood. I suggest basic populism, but that won’t necessarily sit well with the big-donors Beltway Democrats have come to know and love. But I digress.

According to ABC News, the federal government is tracking the phone numbers used by members of the press while they’re talking to confidential sources. From the ABC News blog:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

“It’s time for you to get some new cell phones, quick,” the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

I recently spoke to one of my good friends who happens to be a conservative. (“Some of my best friends are conservatives.”) I like to use him as a barometer of that side of the political spectrum. I asked if he thought that the Bush administration had gone too far by obtaining billions of phone records about tens of millions of American citizens from the big telephone companies. He said, simply, “no.” I didn’t press because, while he humors me on brief inquiries, friction can arise if we dwell on politics for too long.

It’s probably too obvious to bother with, but it seems fairly clear to me that most of the folks who are o.k. with this kind of warrantless domestic surveillance of innocent citizens would have had kittens over Bill Clinton doing the same thing.

This quote from Sen. Leahy about the Bush administration captures the point pretty succinctly:

LEAHY: Every time this administration screws up, whether it’s with homeland security, after Katrina, a massive failure even though they spent billions of dollars to make sure that thing wouldn’t happen, when they screw up along the border, when they get caught doing illegal surveillance of Americans, they say, well, but 9/11, 9/11.

Well, I’d remind them 9/11 happened on their watch. I think Americans are getting fed up with simply using an excuse for your mistakes and classify everything else so that you can’t talk about it.

I want us to be safe. I don’t think that this administration is doing it the right way. They screwed up with homeland security. They screwed up with Katrina. I mean, after all, they were told, go catch a 6’6″ Arab running around Afghanistan, probably on dialysis, according to the press reports, Osama bin Laden.

Ahh, if only.