Here's another miracle: Dave Zweifel will come out against higher taxes. Some day. Not soon, but maybe in the distant future.
Baby, it's cold outside
O.K., I'm looking at the forecast for the rest of the week and the daily high temperatures are expected to be in the low 40s. That is a full 20 degrees below the average temps for mid-October here in southern Wisconsin.
The Weather Channel is reporting today :
... One of the earlier snowfalls of the season we have seen in some time in the Upper Midwest. A general 1 to 3 inches has fallen over parts of Nebraska, Iowa, southern Minnesota and now spilling into Wisconsin.
This comes, of course, after a downright cold summer. The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) calls the summer of 2009 the 34th coolest in the 104 years since 1895 for the contiguous U.S.
Global warming, anyone? Of course, now the catch phrase is "Climate change," which covers all the bases.
Former Vice President Al Gore addressed the Society of Environmental Journalists' annual conference in Madison, Wisconsin on Friday, October 9, 2009. A question and answer period followed the brief address.
Would it be too much to ask of "journalists" to show a little skepticism?
The following clip, provided by the MacIver Institute , illustrates that point perfectly by showing a toady reporter serving up a big fat softball on a tee. Then it segues to a real reporter, one Phelim McAleer, who countered Gore's PowerPoint movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," with "Not Evil, Just Wrong ."
McAleer says environmental journalists too often act as cheerleaders. Can you imagine a convention of political journalists fawning over Tommy Thompson like this?
I give credit to the State Journal's Matthew DeFour for writing:
Gore has been criticized for not publicly debating his position since the release of his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth."
And for noting that Gore rarely takes questions. But then, he must have suspected he was among friends.
Now, I will say that the event organizers were right to close off McAleer's microphone after he was allowed to ask his question. McAleer can be dissatisfied with the response he got from Gore but, the point is, he got a response. Watch:
Let's go nuclear this winter
If you want to clear your head, read journalist William Tucker from a lecture he gave at free-thinking Hillsdale College in Michigan. It's a bit long but, as source material, a real keeper. Tucker makes these points:
All living things exist by drawing energy from their environment and discarding part of it as "waste," so there is nothing inherently shameful about energy consumption. The U.S. currently gets 50 percent of its electricity from coal and 20 percent from nuclear reactors. Reversing these percentages should become a goal of both global warming advocates and anyone who wants to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil. Contrary to what some critics charge, this would not require massive subsidies or direct intervention by the government. A nuclear reactor cannot explode. The Chernobyl meltdown was caused by bad science and worse engineering. The accident at properly deisgned Three Mile Island resulted in the release of no more radiation than a single chest X-ray. A spent fuel rod is 95 percent U-238. This is the same material we can find in a shovel full of dirt from our back yards. [Hillsdale College: The Case for Terrestrial (a.k.a. Nuclear) Energy ]
The political fallout is that the Cap and Trade legislation, despite Gore's optimism, appears to be a dead duck.
The rather large elephants crowding cap-and-trade out of the Senate is the earth's reluctance to warm in the last decade along with new projections saying that we could go another ten years without much warming. [Cap and Trade is Dead ]
Platinum Level bonus subscriber material
Hooray for Madison Police Chief Noble Wray for calling Officer David Retlick "a brave man" in the shooting of an armed robbery suspect. Want proof The Kathleen is not running for governor? Take her 7.9 percent increase in the tax levy. Please. Congratulations to Madame Brenda for instituting the complaint that fined Danisco $500 for "violating" Madison's arcane lobbying law. If you run a company you have to register with the city before you can ask an alderman for permission to do business in this city. Get the message, Danisco? There are other places much happier to accommodate your business expansion.
