But all of that has changed now. Today I started a new job at a local high tech firm, a role that will really challenge me. After a year and a half of struggling to see through the deep fog of my future, I finally have a career to be excited about again.

I’ve learned a lot over the last eighteen months, especially about myself. I’m an humbler, wiser man now, with a deeper appreciation for the simple things of life — primarily because that’s all I had. I hope to keep that perspective as I head into this new endeavor.

And I hope to be more active in maintaining this blog, although I suspect the focus might shift somewhat. I’ve had a lot of time to reflect on the direction our country is heading, and the factors contributing to that course. Politics can be entertaining, but there are other issues that deserve more attention. Stay tuned.

The global warming meltdown confirms all the populist suspicions out there about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked ’science’ to impose cockamamie social mandates on the long-suffering American people, backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank. Don’t think this won’t have consequences.

The current iteration of the movement may be in its death throes, but the corpse will keep trying to crawl out of its casket over the next few years.

In just the past few months has come a cascade of evidence that the global warming scare is based on often dodgy science and even outright fraud.

For several years our local newspaper had a editorial columnist who drank global warming kool-aid by the gallon, and frequently wrote about it. If anyone objected, he waved the IPCC and peer-reviewed journals in their faces. He has since moved elsewhere (no longer in the newspaper business), but I’ve wondered lately how these latest disclosures have affected his cocksure position on the subject.

Here’s my assessment of not just the vote in Massachusetts, but the mood around the country: the same thing that swept Scott Brown into office swept me into office.  People are angry and they are frustrated. Not just because of what’s happened in the last year or two years, but what’s happened over the last eight years.

Get it? It’s all Bush’s fault. The guy’s been gone for a year, and the rabble is still mad at him, and took it out on Coakley. Yeah, that makes sense.

Personally, I hope Obama keeps living in his little fantasy world, thinking that all the country’s problems belong to his predecessor, and he’s just the clean-up guy struggling against an overwhelming mess. The more he talks like this, the greater the Dems will suffer come Nov. 2.

UPDATE: Also from the interview:

We lost some of that sense of speaking directly to the American people about what their core values are and why we have to make sure those institutions are matching up with those values.

Uh, B. O., that’s the problem. The American people don’t need or want someone to tell them “what their core values are.” They already know that. They want somebody to listen to them explain those values. The sneering, dismissive treatment of the tea parties over the last year is precisely what has gotten the Dems in so much hot water.

Michael Goodwin, New York Post:

Obama went to Harvard Law School, but apparently never learned the lessons of the first Boston Tea Party. And so his arrogance and the heavy hand of big government sparked the second. A year to the day after he made history by taking the oath, he stands on the wrong side of a new American revolution.

Mortimer Zuckerman, The Daily Beast:

Obama’s ability to connect with voters is what launched him. But what has surprised me is how he has failed to connect with the voters since he’s been in office. . . . He’s lost his audience. He has not rallied public opinion. He has plunged in the polls more than any other political figure since we’ve been using polls. He’s done everything wrong. Well, not everything, but the major things. I don’t consider it a triumph. I consider it a disaster.

John Judis, The New Republic:

Obama now clearly faces not just a recession and two wars, but a political crisis. He needs to adopt policies that will boost employment, but he may not have the political clout to do so. He needs to restore the public’s faith in his own leadership, but it’s not clear to me how he can accomplish that.

Follow this link to the actual web page to see the county-by-county mouse-over results.

My prediction for 2010: Hillary will resign her position as Secretary of State, and rebuild her own promotional machine, a la Sarah Palin, to restore her political fortune. It must really chafe her to watch Palin waltz about the country, free as a bird, appearing before large, adoring crowds, while she is stuck on a diplomatic mission to Lower Slobovia. She will position herself as the anti-Obama, the progressive who has all the right credentials, but also the experience and competence to do the job right.

Climategate reveals skulduggery the general public can understand: that a tightly-linked clique of scientists were behaving as crusaders. Their letters reveal they were working in what they repeatedly labelled a “cause” to promote a political agenda.

That’s not science, that’s a crusade. When you cherry-pick, discard, nip, tuck, and tape disparate bits of data into the most alarming portrayal you can in the name of a “cause,” you’re not engaged in science, but in the production of propaganda. And this clique tried to subvert the peer-review process as well. They attempted to prevent others from getting into peer reviewed journals — thus letting them claim skeptic research wasn’t peer-reviewed — a convenient circular (and dishonest) way to discredit skeptics.

The dishonesty exposed by the Climategate data is not an isolated aberration. Rather, it is symptomatic of a wider disease that has infected all of Western culture. “Truth” is no longer an objective standard that should be sought and honored. Instead, it has become whatever the individual wants it to be. In this case, the “whatever” is a one-world utopia governed by technocrats who know what’s best for the rest of us.

What 2009 has taught us is how rapidly the nature of the threat from Islamic jihadists is evolving and how utterly unable our government is to recognize and respond to that threat. Sadly, I predict that the coming year will show us how bold, aggressive, and inventive our enemies have become and how little we have learned from the events of the past year.