Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse. As if the story of the $50 billion fraudster who has given us the latest world financial shock was not bad news enough, this morning’s The Independent has a really frightening story. “Arctic at tipping point” brings the glad tidings that scientists have found the first unequivocal evidence that the Arctic region is warming at a faster rate than the rest of the world, at least a decade before it was predicted to happen. Evidence that air temperatures in the region are higher than would be normally expected during the autumn because the increased melting of the summer Arctic sea ice is accumulating heat in the ocean — a phenomenon, known as Arctic amplification, that will be presented overnight at a conference of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Not playing Perkins. There might come a time when Australian politicians will need to make some hard decisions about measures to combat global warming, but this is hardly one of them. Both Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull know it and showed it yesterday with their statements on an emissions trading scheme. Both securely headed for the middle of the spectrum of possibilities where electoral safety lies. Both want to wait and see if the world reaches a global agreement before promising to create too much of the hardship of dramatic change.

Perhaps Kevin Rudd has put himself more squarely in the centre than Malcolm Turnbull. The Government has gone for minimal targets reducing carbon emissions that can be undone without too great a cost should next year’s efforts at an international agreement fail completely. The opinion polls suggest that some action is considered by voters to be preferable to the Liberal position of postponing any action until there has been more study.

Where a politician interested in being re-elected does not want to be (and there are few politicians not so interested) is at the poles of possible action. Being a climate change denier is as sure a way of losing votes as being a zealot who advocates doing what he or she thinks is right irrespective of the short term consequences on the voters.

The inhabitants of those poles are like the air force commander in Beyond the Fringe.

“Perkins, I’m asking you to lay down your life. We need a futile gesture at this stage — it’ll raise the whole tone of the war. Get up in a crate, Perkins… pop over to Bremen… take a shufti… don’t come back. Goodbye, Perkins. God, I wish I was going, too.”

“Goodbye, sir. Or is it… ‘au revoir’?”

“No, Perkins.”

Feeling happier about a President Obama. I admit to feeling happier this week about the world having a President Obama as its supreme ruler. Until the case of Rod Blagojevich broke forth, I was a bit nervous about whether this seeming political novice was made of the right stuff to safely guide us through a world of Muslim terrorists and greedy but incompetent international financiers. There was this terrible fear that this wizard of oratory’s words would be insufficient protection when confronted with the collection of hard men he will have to deal with come the end of January.

Reading about the troubles of Governor Blagojevich showed me the error of my ways. Barack Obama has grown up in what is surely as tough a political school as anything Vladimir Putin confronted in the KGB. Osama Bin Laden proved he is a master manipulator by getting young men to blow themselves up for his cause, but the incoming President of the USA fought his way up through the Democratic machine politics of Illinois.

The thing that shows how great Obama’s political skills are, is that his progress through the ranks from southside lawyer to state senator to US Senator to President occurred without his reputation being tarnished. That’s a mighty achievement in a city where, as Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described it recently, Gov. Blagojevich in his tapped phone calls was acting like just another corrupt Chicago politician. “He squeezed people,” wrote Kass. “That’s how things are done in the city that is not Camelot.”

Some of those Chicago Democrats who quickly turned on their man the Governor and demanded he go and go quickly were clearly motivated by a desire to stop any poking around by a Federal Attorney General, who was not one of their boys, turning into a broader investigation of the way Illinois politics is played. They had their own skins to protect and didn’t want Obama’s reforming parade rained on before he even took the oath on Capitol Hill.

And then there was the one who wanted Blagojevich’s job for herself — State Attorney General Lisa Madigan who on Friday asked the State Supreme Court to declare the Governor “disabled”. John Kass describes her role thus:

What they didn’t report on the evening news is this: Lisa Madigan is more than just “the people’s lawyer.” She’s a candidate for governor and Dead Meat is in her way. Her daddy is Mike Madigan, powerful boss of the machine’s 13th Ward and speaker of the Illinois House who hates Dead Meat. Her dad wants to make her governor. She wants to be governor. And the best way to get there is to whisk Dead Meat into a political straitjacket and lock him in the political version of a padded cell.

And as for President elect Obama, columnist Kass asked his readers to “just imagine if Dead Meat talks to the feds, or stands up on his hind legs to fight back if fellow Democrats impeach him in the Illinois legislature. The governor might actually mention a few of the legislators’ deals. Ouch.

“Obama, though not personally implicated in any of this, wouldn’t like it much. The national media outlets were desperate to portray him as someone about to transcend our politics. But in Chicago he was just a smooth guy on the way up, looking the other way.”

A smooth guy, yes, and he probably was just looking the other way, but success for President Obama will not come because the American national media can portray him as someone who transcends politics. His success, because of the all pervasive influence of the United States on the rest of us, will only come if he can actually play politics. And the evidence of this little post election episode suggests that he can.

The Governor: coming or going? The Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, has sensibly ignored the clamouring of the out of Chicago media for him to resign after being caught on phone taps trying to raise a dollar or two in campaign funds. Like that other Chicago son of a migrant, Barack Obama, the Guv rose in a tough school to reach high political office. He knows that it is not network television hosts who will be voting on his impeachment. His principal wheeling and dealing will continue to be done within the confines of the local Democratic Party.

And what wonderful wheeling and dealing it will surely prove to be. The prospect of Gov. Blagojevich singing along to the Federal Attorney General about the fund raising and other activities of some of those gunning to get him should have Republicans salivating. No wonder Team Obama was so quick to declare that their man had had no contact with the man about who would choose his replacement as a Senator.

The team of the family headed by the Revd Jesse Jackson, whose son Jesse Jr was a co-chairman of the Obama presidential campaign, has not escaped as cleanly. Evidence of discussions with the embattled Governor about getting the nod to be the replacement Senator can not be denied, although Jesse Jr strongly refutes any suggestion that he has offered a lazy half-a-million or so to ensure selection.

So far there is no sign that Governor Blagojevich is in any mood to gracefully retire from the Governor’s mansion. It will take several weeks apparently for the Federal Attorney General to gather evidence to put before a grand jury and the process of impeachment by the Illinois House of Representatives would spill well over in to the new year.

Having backed the man to still be Governor come New Year’s Day, when the market rated it an 80% chance that he would not survive that long, I note that this morning the market puts survival as a 50:50 bet. I’m in no mood to take my profit yet. as this wonderful example of how politics is really played continues to get such readable public exposure.