To get up to speed if you haven’t been following this story closely, here’s my post on it yesterday. Short version: A large batch of data from one of the world’s leading climate science centers was released on the Internet last week; this includes thousands of emails and other documents that reveal scientists at the center — people who have been intimately involved in the reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — may have been manipulating their data, and certainly intended to foil Freedom of Information requests and keep contrarian researchers out of peer-review journals if possible.

The focus on the story has turned from the emails the scientists exchanged to the computer code their center was using to produce its data sets, which have been an integral part of the IPCC’s reports. Declan McCullagh at CBS News reports some of the findings so far:

One programmer highlighted the error of relying on …

FRANKFORT — A U.S. Census worker found dead in a secluded Clay County [Kentucky] cemetery killed himself but tried to make the death look like a homicide, authorities have concluded.

Bill Sparkman, 51, of London, might have tried to cover the manner of his death to preserve payments under two life-insurance polices that he had taken out. The policies wouldn’t pay off if Sparkman committed suicide, state police Capt. Lisa Rudzinski said.

(snip)

Sparkman’s nude body was found Sept. 12 by people visiting the cemetery. There was a rope around his neck tied to a tree, and he had what appeared to be the word “fed” written on his chest in black marker.

His census identification card was taped to his head.

The bizarre details of the death caused a firestorm of media coverage and widespread speculation on the Internet, including that someone angry at the federal government attacked Sparkman as he went door to door, gathering census information.

There has been some …

What was missing was a paper trail indicating that warmists were manipulating the exchange of information and attempting to silence skeptics. Until now.

The recent release of several dozen megabytes of information from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia has struck a huge blow against the politics, and perhaps the science, of AGW. It’s unclear whether these …

Move forward to September of this year, and the whole map looks bruised.

I don’t intend this as a “blame Obama” post. The recession and the rise in unemployment started before he took office. But even “Saturday Night Live” understands that what the administration has been trying so far — namely, spending more money and piling up even more debt that will have to be repaid — isn’t working.

Now that the House has passed one health bill and the Senate Finance Committee another, Georgia’s number crunchers have estimated just how unfunded it would be for our state.

The answer: as much as $2.6 billion before 2020.

Two-point-six billion dollars, and in only five full years of spending. That’s under the bill passed in the House. The annual sum under that legislation would exceed half a billion dollars by 2019. (These and all other figures in this column, unless otherwise noted, come from the Department of Community Health.)

The Senate Finance Committee’s version would be little better: just over $2 billion cumulatively, and more than $400 million a year by 2019.

These figures represent only the state’s share of adding as …

The good news, from a regional competitiveness perspective: Of these 40 metro areas, eight are in what I’d call the Southeast…and Atlanta is the safest of these eight.

The details:

Atlanta is middle-of-the-road out of the 40 areas when it comes to violent crime or workplace fatalities. (In this scale, 40 is worst and 1 is best.) Detroit’s having the most violent crime isn’t all that surprising, but Indianapolis worst for workplace fatalities? Are there any Hoosiers here who can explain that?

Our worst score comes on traffic death rates, where we’re ninth most dangerous — but, again, ahead of most of our Southeastern peers. That includes Orlando-Kissimmee (most dangerous roads out of the 40) Jacksonville (second), Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater (third) and Miami-Fort …

It would also be the first significant foreign-policy win for President Obama — if (and that’s a big “if”) he can get Democrats in Congress to go along with it.

Congress has been skeptical of trade deals since Democrats took over in 2007, the continuation of a big about-face on trade by the party. From John F. Kennedy to Bill Clinton, postwar American presidents (and Congresses, since Democrats ruled Capitol Hill for most of those years) pushed the cause of free trade, to the benefit of Americans and others around the world. Over the last decade or so, however, labor unions and environmentalists have dulled Democrats’ free-trade instincts in the name of imposing their ideological preferences and …

MY QUESTION: Is the administration prepared to have KSM…acquitted because jurors are uncomfortable with some interrogation techniques used on him?

WHAT HOLDER SAID: “Failure is not an option. These are cases that have to be won. I don’t expect that we will have a contrary result.”

Sen. Herb Kohl, the Wisconsin Democrat, called this “an interesting point of view.” What he meant was: If we’re going to put these terrorists through civilian trials in order to prove something about America and our values to “the world,” should our top law-enforcement official be prejudging the …

Our health-care system suffers from problems of cost, access and quality, and needs major reform. Tax policy drives employment-based insurance; this begets overinsurance and drives costs upward while creating inequities for the unemployed and self-employed. A regulatory morass limits innovation. And deep flaws in Medicare and Medicaid drive spending without optimizing care.

Speeches and news reports can lead you to believe that proposed congressional legislation would tackle the problems of cost, access and quality. But that’s not true. The various bills do deal with access by expanding Medicaid and mandating subsidized insurance at substantial cost—and thus addresses an important social goal. However, there are no provisions to substantively control the growth of costs or raise the quality of care. So the overall effort will fail to …

Their list: Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and…drumroll, please…Dick Cheney. They don’t say why they listed the potential candidates in this particular order.

They also list some “second-tier” candidates (shouldn’t that be …