Sunday Scan

The OCRegister editorial page leads off today's scan with its editorial giving a cool reception to Al Gore's ignoble Nobel:

"Nearly every significant statement that Vice President Gore makes regarding climate science and climate policy is either one-sided, misleading, exaggerated, speculative or wrong," says CEI environmental policy expert Marlo Lewis. Otherwise, nice job Mr. Gore.

Global warming alarmism serves those opposing free-market economics and its fossil-fuel reliance and those seeking power and profit by gaming the system once they force rule changes. Neither motive is in most peoples' interests. The Kyoto Protocol, which would force nations to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, if enforced would reduce projected temperatures about one degree over 100 years while – and this is not exaggeration – dampening and devastating economies worldwide.

Gore got a much warmer reception in Palo Alto, where young and old alike believe his hype, says an also hyped up Merc News:

Mackenzie Pope, 12, ... was one of several kids who had the day off from school [what?!] and showed up with signs saying [to Gore] "Welcome to Palo Alto."

"I was walking my dog when I saw all the people here and so I went home to get them," she said, motioning to her mom, little sisters Bailey and Rylie, and a couple of friends. [Mackenzie, Bailey and Rylie -- how cloyingly No. Cal.]

The girls, like typical Palo Alto kids, were well-versed on the climate-change issue.

"They say in 20 years New York City is going to be half gone," said Mackenzie's friend, Charlotte Barry.

The alliance is a small organization Gore founded last year as a fundraising arm for his media campaign. Its office, at Hawthorne Avenue and High Street, once housed the Foundation for a Global Community, a descendant of Beyond War. And it's next door to POST, the Peninsula Open Space Trust.

"This spot has good karma," said POST Executive Director Audrey Rust. "We're sort of at ground zero, right here on High Street."

The Merc News, which is after all a news paper, somehow didn't feel compelled to correct little Charlotte's gorism.

Babs At The Money Trough

Wrapping up news from the Golden State, the LATimes reports that Bay Area Greenie Babs Boxer is swimming in dough from the very hooligans against The Sacred Earth Mother she has worked so hard to harm:

For years Barbara Boxer has campaigned, first for Congress, then for the U.S. Senate, as a progressive Democrat strong on ... the environment. ...

But now that she's chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, she's finding some new people who want to be her friend. And not in the MySpace kind of way.

Roll Call reports (sorry, it's a subscriber-access page) that Boxer, who assumed the committee chair with the 2006 Democratic takeover of the Senate, received through Aug. 30 about $41,000 from political action committees representing "energy, natural resources, construction and transportation industries."

But in the 2004 cycle, when she was last up for re-election, Boxer "reported $18,500 in total receipts from the energy and natural resources sector in all of 2003 and 2004, according to CQ MoneyLine ....

Politicians. Love 'em or hate 'em, you gotta pay 'em off.

Don't Worry About Islam

There's a complicated piece by Simon Jenkins in the Times of London spurred by the 29-page letter to the Pope from 138 imams and other Muslim high and mighty. Jenkins doesn't see Islam as the biggest threat to the West, rather:

The chief threat to world security at present lies in the capacity of tiny groups of political Islamists to goad the West into a rolling military retaliation. Extremists on each side feed off the others’ frenzied scenarios so as to garner money and political support for their respective armies of the night. Each sees the other as a cosmic menace and abandons communal tolerance and peaceful diplomacy to counter it.

It's easy to discount this out of hand because Jenkins slices too thin. Our fear isn't of the tiny groups of jihadists ... it's the consequences of even five or ten percent of Islam picking up the jihadist terror tool kit. Still, the piece isn't just liberal pap and multi-culti over-optimism. There's a lot of food for thought there, like:

It is ironic that defeat in the cold war should have led Russia to the exuberant self-confidence of Vladimir Putin’s Moscow, while victory has plunged the West into a loss of nerve. In both Washington and London are leaders who have so little confidence in democracy as to regard it as vulnerable to a few madmen, and who have so little respect for democracy’s freedoms as to suspend them at the bang of a bomb.

I believe the liberties that have been suspended have been carefully defined and limited so as to protect Americans and subject suspicious foreigners and battlefield enemies to the treatment that is needed and deserved. But how about this for a Sunday pondering: What if we fought the war on terror the way the Libs would have us fight it? Would we not still win?

Of course, to answer that, you also have to answer this: Would the extra American dead that might result from the Lib approach be worth the rigorous, hard-line protection of each letter of the Constitution, as applied by Lib judges?

Watch It, Canadians!

Canadian readers, watch out! Science Daily tells us that according to the journal Environmental Research, you might be one of the 25,000 Canadians pollution will kill this year! I love these studies that pore over medical records and death certificates and attempt to lay the blame at pollution, or global warming, or fast food, or whatever else the Lib media have their eyepieces focused on.

Here's the picture that accompanies the story. I kid you not. Look at that awful, life-nipping gunk! The caption reads:

Photo taken near Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Industry in the foreground, pristine mountains in the background -- Canada is not immune to environmental problems. (Credit: Michele Hogan)

Help me find the industries in the photo that are cavalierly ignoring Canada's environmental laws and spewing toxins into drinking water and mother's milk. More easily, help me find manipulated statistics that look at cancer deaths and low birth-weight babies (as this one did) and attribute them to pollution instead of, oh, the luck of the draw or genetics or moms who smoke and booze.

Corn Fission?

Earlier in the week, Syrian flacks toured media hacks around an ag field and ag lab that they say were targeted by Israeli fighters ... why the Zionists would do that, who knows? After reporting the tour with almost a completely straight face, today the NYT joins those who understand what really was going on there:

WASHINGTON, Oct. 13 — Israel's air attack on Syria last month was directed against a site that Israeli and American intelligence analysts judged was a partly constructed nuclear reactor, apparently modeled on one North Korea has used to create its stockpile of nuclear weapons fuel, according to American and foreign officials with access to the intelligence reports.

The description of the target addresses one of the central mysteries surrounding the Sept. 6 attack, and suggests that Israel carried out the raid to demonstrate its determination to snuff out even a nascent nuclear project in a neighboring state.

Central mystery? Not to everyone.

Who Defines 'Dying Well?'

Charlotte Allen, faced with minor breast cancer surgery -- seemingly an oxymoron, but not really -- was asked on three separate occasions whether she had a living will. A complicated form was stuffed into her mitt, asking her to ponder "a range of conditions under which I might like to have a Do Not Resuscitate order hung over my hospital bed, whether I would want to be denied "artificial" food and water under some circumstances, what I thought about being taken off a ventilator, and so forth."

Her conclusion, as very well relayed in her WaPo piece today:

In fact, when I contemplate the concept of "dying well," I can't avoid the uneasy feeling that it actually means "dying when we, the intellectual elite, think it is appropriate for you to die." Consider what's happened in recent years: The classic Hippocratic Oath and its prohibition against physicians giving people a "deadly drug" has collapsed with the growing acceptance of such notions as physician-assisted suicide, the "right to die," and even giving some very sick, disabled or demented people a little push over the edge, as seems to be the case in the Netherlands. People facing end-of-life decisions may well feel subtle pressure from the medical and bioethical establishments to make the choice that will save the most money, as well as spare their relatives and society at large the burden of their continued existence.

As the SCHIP plan catches the news and the Dems vow to override a prez veto, do you recall ever seeing someone raise the question of whether parents would be pressured to quickly dispatch sick babies once the feds start paying for their costly health care? Neither did I.

Start thinking about it.

Road to Rangoon

No, it's not a long-lost Bob Hope/Bing Crosby movie; it's the UN's continuing dismal performance in its attempts to stop the Burmese junta from killing off every monk and protester in that poor country.

In this case, the road will lead UN chief Burma dude Ibrahim Gambari to Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China and Japan, before "hoping" to return to Burma. Condi's response? Knock it off! Get back to Burma pronto and do something.

Good advice.