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John Stossel starts us off today.
Another global warming skeptic has dared speak up. Meteorologist John Coleman, founder of the Weather Channel, calls global warming “the greatest scam in history”.
“Environmental extremists, notable politicians among them … create this wild ‘scientific’ scenario of the civilization threatening environmental consequences from Global Warming unless we adhere to their radical agenda. … I have read dozens of scientific papers. I have talked with numerous scientists. …There is no runaway climate change. The impact of humans on climate is not catastrophic. Our planet is not in peril. … In time, a decade or two, the outrageous scam will be obvious.”
I suspect he’s right.
But what if he’s wrong? …
John Podhoretz has taken over as editor of Commentary. And he has brought new attention to the magazine’s blog Contentions where he and Noah Pollak have an exchange on the Annapolis confab which provides some context and understanding for this most recent Mideast peace effort.
Andrew McCarthy’s NRO article was referenced by Pollak above. So it’s here.
The thug Assad regime of Syria will apparently take a couple of days off from murdering Lebanese democrats and enabling the anti-American jihad in Iraq to attend this week’s Annapolis summit … or “conference,†or “meeting.†It’s difficult to say how we should describe Condoleezza Rice’s pie-in-the-sky confab. After all, the main principals — an Israeli prime minister hanging on by a thread and a Palestinian “president†whose only constituency seems to be the U.S. State Department — cannot even agree on what to call it, much less on an agenda.
I’m going with “farce.†…
George Will entertains with speculation on vice-presidential running mates.
A high-priced lawyer, a low-priced lawyer and the tooth fairy are sitting at a table on which rests a $100 bill. The lights go out briefly, and when they come back on the bill is gone. Who took it? Obviously, the high-priced lawyer—the other two are figments of our imaginations.
Here is another such figment: People who vote for a presidential candidate because of that candidate’s running mate. There may be such people, but have you ever met one?
Still, it is neither pointless nor premature to wonder who each of the four most likely nominees—Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney—might choose to run with. The question illuminates the different challenges the candidates face in cobbling together 270 electoral votes. …
Mark Steyn comments on Dem candidates as “change agents.”
What do you think is the critical issue in this election season? Personally, I blow hot and cold. I used to think the key issue facing the nation was “hope.†But now I wonder if perhaps it isn’t “change.†It was only last year that I bought The Audacity of Hope by this fellow called Barack Obama. How audacious hope seemed back then! How bold, how courageous! But now, a mere twelve months later, hope seems cheap, glib, easy.
“There has been a lot of talk in this campaign about the politics of hope,†said this guy in Iowa the other day. “But understand this: The politics of hope doesn’t mean hoping that things come easy.†It turned out to be the same Barack Obama who’d been going on about the audacity of hope. But now he’s fine-tuned his campaign, and he’s running on “change.â€
No, don’t yawn. Hillary Clinton may be running around New Hampshire on her “Ready for Change†tour, but that kind of facile focus-group change is just the same-old-same-old. “Change can’t just be a slogan,†says Senator Obama, who’s committed to a Democratic party “that doesn’t just offer change as a slogan but real, meaningful change, change that America can believe in. That’s why I’m in this race, that’s why I’m running for the presidency of the United States, to offer change that we can believe in.â€
Any cynical hack pol can offer change as a slogan, but Senator Obama’s offering “Change You Can Believe In†as a slogan. …
BBC News reminds us this month is the 75th anniversary of the start of the Soviet’s terror famine in Ukraine.
… The “Holodomor” or “famine plague” as it is known in Ukraine, was part of Joseph Stalin’s programme to crush the resistance of the peasantry to the collectivisation of farming. When in 1932 the grain harvest did not meet the Kremlin’s targets, activists were sent to the villages where they confiscated not just grain and bread, but all the food they could find. The confiscations continued into 1933, and the results were devastating. No-one is sure how many people died, but historians say that in under a year at least three million and possibly up to 10 million starved to death. The horrors Ekaterina saw live with her still.
“We didn’t have any funerals – whole families died,” she tells me. “Of our neighbours I remember all the Solveiki family died, all of the Kapshuks, all the Rahachenkos too – and the Yeremo family – three of them, still alive, were thrown into the mass grave.”
Ekaterina, her mother and brother, survived by eating tree bark, roots and whatever they could find – but she says starvation drove others to terrible deeds. “One day mother said to us, ‘children, you can’t take your usual shortcut through the village anymore because the grandpa in the house nearby killed his grandson and ate him – and now he’s been killed by his son… And don’t go near the priest’s house either – because the neighbours there have killed and eaten their children.’” …
Townhall columnist, Michael McBride, muses on John Kerry’s swift strategy with T. Boone Pickens. Since it’s Kerry, we start the humor section here.
… Most people recognize that the truth lays somewhere between what the Swiftboaters claim and what Kerry claims. What is also clear though is that swinging back four years later, will not clear the decks of this issue entirely. For Kerry to do that he HAS to have DOD release the entirety of his record for full public scrutiny. Only then will we know if his reputation has been diminished by a Swiftboating, or overly enhanced by MSMboating.
Whatever comes of it, we certainly know Kerry is no boxer. If he pursues this, I predict a second round knockout.
Kathleen Parker writes about folks who sterilize themselves to the save the planet.
On a lighter note, we might have avoided all such concerns if only the mothers of (these people) had been as “virtuous” as their progeny.