Yes, we've paid a heavy cost in lives and dollars, but the benefits are enormous: the madman and terrorism supporter Saddam Hussein and his monster sons, who had previously used WMDs, killed hundreds of thousands, and operated torture chambers, have been eliminated; democracy has gained a desperate foothold in the heart of the Middle East; and Al Qaeda has been defeated. The war on terrorism continues around the globe, but Iraq was Al Qaeda's focal point.

Unfortunately, I don't think there will ever be a singular victory moment, a day where all of America (and the rest of the civilized world, for that matter) can celebrate the return home of our military heroes with ticker-tape parades and grand speeches. This isn't a conventional war where the enemy is finally forced to formally and unconditionally surrender at a court house or upon the deck of a battleship.

President Obama spoke the most revealing and clarifying 10 words of his control-freak administration this week: "I think at some point you have made enough money." Peddling financial regulatory reform at a rally in Quincy, Ill., Obama then ad-libbed peculiar definitions of what he called the "American way" and the profit motive: "(Y)ou can just keep on making it if you're providing a good product or providing good service. We don't want people to stop, ah, fulfilling the core responsibilities of the financial system to help grow our economy."

Fundamental lesson of Capitalism 101: Governments and bureaucrats don't make what people want and need. They only get in the way. It is individuals, cooperating peacefully and voluntarily, working together without mandate or central design, who produce the world's goods and services. They make what people desire and demand for themselves, not what Obama and his imperial overlords ordain that the masses should have.

...had Barack Obama run on the agenda he actually implemented during his first year in office — “Elect me and I shall appoint worthies like Craig Becker, Anita Dunn, and Van Jones; stimulate the economy through a $1.7-trillion annual deficit; take over health care, the auto industry, student loans, and insurance; push for amnesty for illegal aliens and cap-and-trade; and reach out to Iran, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela” — he would have been laughed out of Iowa.

The country voted for the party of Pelosi, Reid, and Obama, and for once such statists are governing in the manner of their rhetoric. Time will soon tell whether this strange American experience is transitory and so becomes a needed catharsis, or whether it will be institutionalized and thus result in an enduring tragedy — this rare moment when the dreams of a zealous few are at last becoming the nightmares of a complacent many.

"[O]ur government is deeply in debt after what can only be described as a decade of profligacy." So he proposes to put the country far more deeply in debt through profligacy of a sort that was undreamed of just a few years ago.

Obama said: "[W]e can't simply move beyond this crisis; we have to address the irresponsibility that led to it, and that includes the failure to rein in spending...." But his budget doesn't rein in spending, it increases it over last year's precedent-shattering total by around $100 billion.

Obama said: "[I]t would be a terrible mistake to borrow against our children's future to pay our way today...." His budget, in just the next year, will borrow $1.6 trillion against our children's future to pay our way today.

Either Obama has completely lost touch with reality, or he thinks we have.

But what had been a chronic problem that all involved knew needed corrective action has now become, in the Obama years, a full-fledged disaster in the making.

According to the president’s budget, released yesterday, the federal deficit for 2010 is expected to reach nearly $1.6 trillion, a record. And that would come on top of a $1.4-trillion deficit in 2009 and before another $1.3-trillion deficit in 2011. Between 1789 and 2008, the U.S. government borrowed a total of $5.8 trillion. But in just the first three years of the Obama administration, the government is set borrow $4.4 trillion more.

And even that wouldn’t be the end of it. If the Obama budget is adopted in full, federal borrowing will top $18 trillion by 2020. Over the period 2011 to 2020, the president’s plan is to run deficits totaling an astounding $8.5 trillion.

So either the opponents of a serious energy/climate bill with a price on carbon don’t care about our being addicted to oil and dependent on petro-dictators forever or they really believe that we will not be adding 2.5 billion more people who want to live like us, so the price of oil won’t go up very far and, therefore, we shouldn’t raise taxes to stimulate clean, renewable alternatives and energy efficiency.

His opposition is no longer ossified, but decentralized and grass roots. One of the oddest proofs of that statement is the sudden leftist furor at tea parties, town halls, the media, dissent, and free speech. As long as Obama was opposed by calcified Republicans in Congress, there was no real danger to him. But once the opposition proved populist, panicked liberal elites started demonizing populism — and Obama now finds himself opposed to the popular grievance-mongering that was once the mother’s milk of our Chicago organizer’s existence.

Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical — and that doesn’t even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.

Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN’s and MSNBC’s combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN — which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a Saturday Night Live skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?

“Sometimes I lie awake at night, and ask, 'Where have I gone wrong?' Then a voice says to me, 'This is going to take more than one night.'”- Charles M. Schulz

The Nobel Committee, after careful consideration, is pleased to announce that the winner of the Nobel Liberal Prize is awarded to President Barack Obama, long may He reign. The Committee was swayed by His outstanding and dedicated efforts to denigrate the history of the United States while speaking abroad. We are continually impressed by His tireless efforts to transform America from an evil, capitalistic, strong, free society into a good, socialistic, weak, and dependent society. President Obama simply won't rest until the U.S. government is as big as His ego, and America is no better than any other country. In fact, if it were a little worse than most, that would be great.

But what clinched the award was the amazing extent to which President Obama is not President Bush the Horrible. We can't get over it. It's like Obama is the anti-Bush. That, by itself, is reason enough for us to award the Nobel Liberal Prize to the One.

Yes, we're serious.

There is more evidence that global warming is non-event, and Jonah Goldberg discusses the matter quite reasonably. It all shows how legislation such as the proposed "cap and trade" bill are not really about the environment, but about the expansion of government at the expense of capitalism and sound science.

Rich Lowry has Obama the Arrogant nailed in An Obama Speech in 13 Easy Steps. If there was every a president that was actually the complete opposite of what he claimed to be during his campaign (in Obama's case, a "uniter"), it's Obama.

Obama's overall approval rating has slipped below 50%, and there is majority opposition to some of his signature items: government-run healthcare, cap and trade, and tax increases. Just when I start to lose hope in America (see the last election), the citizenry always comes through and bucks me up.

If Obama were smart, he'd stop pushing 1,000-page massive government bills. He'd scale back, let the economy recover, take (undeserved) credit for it, and watch his poll numbers increase. It's really pretty simple: the citizens want prosperity, security, and minimal conflict. The prosperity will come, if The One would just get out of the way. We have security, thanks to the Bush Administration, and the conflict in Afghanistan seems far more remote and abstract than the Iraq liberation did (what exactly is the end-game in Afghanistan anyway? Can anybody be bothered to ask? Where are all the war protesters now?).

If Obama isn't smart enough to scale back his far-left agenda, hopefully his sinking approval ratings will prevent him from enacting it.

Go here for more details.

Our liberal friends like to talk about "sustainability." The government's enormous spending and gargantuan debt are nothing if not unsustainable, and it's a bipartisan phenomenon. The national debt under President Bush increased by a whopping $2.5 trillion dollars. It is projected to increase under President Obama by a mind-blowing $4.9 trillion. That's $4,900,000,000,000. That's $16,000 for every man, woman, and child in the United States. If my back-of-an-envelope math is correct, if you were to place that amount of cash in one dollar bills end-to-end, it would stretch from Washington, D.C. all the way to the sun -- five times.

And that's just the increase in the debt.

I will attend the Tea Party today in downtown Sarasota. I don't know if all the Tea Parties around the country will have a big impact or lasting effect on the course of our government, but I suspect they might. I believe there's a large, normally-quiet-but-now-fed-up segment of the citizenry that is finally ready to have their voices heard. They aren't happy with either political party. They know (and love) enough about our country's founding to realize how far we have strayed from its principles. They are afraid the United States is turning toward socialism. They are tired of taxes, taxes, and more taxes. They are repulsed by the very idea of a 60,000 page tax code. They hate wealth-transferring policies. They don't like the feeling that we are working for the government, not the other way around. They don't like how incredibly out-of-touch most of our politicians are.

At a time when almost all Americans are tightening their financial belts and streamlining their spending, the government is spending like never before. The Tea Partiers are looking for change... real change (not campaign fluff "change")... concrete change... fundamental change... For the sake of our nation, I hope today will be the beginning.

"...federal spending (in inflation-adjusted 2007 dollars) has gone from $600 billion in 1965 to $3 trillion today."

The President-elect's so-called “tax cut” will absolve 48 per cent of Americans from paying any federal income tax at all, while those that are left will pay more. Just under half the population will be, as Daniel Henninger pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, on the dole. By 2012, it will be more than half, and this will be an electorate where the majority of the electorate will be able to vote itself more lollipops from the minority of their compatriots still dumb enough to prioritize self-reliance, dynamism, and innovation over the sedating cocoon of the nanny state. That is the death of the American idea — which, after all, began as an economic argument: “No taxation without representation" is a great rallying cry. “No representation without taxation” has less mass appeal. For how do you tell an electorate living high off the entitlement hog that it's unsustainable and you've got to give some of it back?

Excerpting:

The home of a Central Florida Republican headquarters manager was shot up and damaged over his support of Sen. John McCain, the man told police...

Coverely said he has taken about 300 calls concerning stolen or vandalized McCain signs in the area. "It says this campaign is getting vicious," Coverely said. Coverely said it appears Democrats are becoming more aggressive in the county.

"I wouldn't say slipping but I would say the Democrats have become far more aggressive in Seminole County because it is such a heavy Republican area," Coverely said.

"Someone etched obscenities and "KKK" into the paint, burned several areas of the car with cigarettes, set the flag on fire on his hood and may have urinated on the vehicle. Officers and the owner think the car was singled out because of its political stickers, including one reading "Nobama."

"This is definitely a hate crime," said the Armstrong (the owner), a 41-year-old physician.

Police estimated damage at $4,500. Police classified the incident as "criminal mischief/hate crime" and said it appeared "to be politically/racially motivated because the victim affixed a bumper sticker supporting the McCain campaign as well as an anti-Obama bumper sticker."

“One of the reasons I feel so good for her, just as a human being is I have never seen anybody undergo the ridicule, the slanders and the lies, and the blogosphere and what they’re doing, and breaking into her private e-mail, rumors and things about her, and now, most recently, belittling her, taking little snippets of interviews and laughing at her and satirizing her. Those people ought to be ashamed of themselves, if they’re capable of shame, because they’ve proven that what they were doing does not represent who she was and who she is. Thank goodness, just as she said, that this was an unfiltered event for an hour and a half. She could stand toe-to-toe with Joe Biden, who’s been around for all these many, many years, and basically take him to the woodshed.”

...Bush is much like Truman, who developed the sinews of war for a new era (the Department of Defense, the CIA, the NSA), expanded the powers of the presidency, established a new doctrine for active intervention abroad, and ultimately engaged in a war (Korea) — also absent an attack on the U.S. — that proved highly unpopular.

So unpopular that Truman left office disparaged and highly out of favor. History has revised that verdict. I have little doubt that Bush will be the subject of a similar reconsideration.

Years later, we tend to forget all the dimensions of that sinister homicidal bombing of our institutions. Radical Islam brazenly signaled that it need not have missiles or sophisticated bombers to burn 16 acres in the heart of Manhattan and set the Pentagon afire. Instead, it could turn from the inside out our own technology against us, in a manner that we were scarcely aware of — and in an iconic fashion at the heart of our greatest cities, ensuring collective psychological trauma that trumped even the terrible loss in blood and treasure.

...While many rightly point to lapses in the conduct of the Iraq war, faulty intelligence, and wrongheaded emphasis on supposed arsenals of WMDs rather than the casus belli outlined in the 23 writs authorized by the Congress, few can answer a more existential question: Had we not met, defeated, and humiliated tens of thousands of jihadists on the battlefields of Iraq, where else might we have inflicted such a terrible defeat on our enemies — given the nuclear sanctuary of Pakistan, the bellicose governments of Iran and Syria, and the duplicity of the Gulf monarchies? And if we had not killed, captured, scattered, and turned our enemies abroad, how then might we have prevented them from coming back here to attack us at home? And are the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, as in the past, aiding anti-American terrorists, or helping to hunt them down?

...But in years to come it may well be said that the president kept us safe for years when none thought he could, and removed the two most odious regimes in the Middle East and replaced them with the two best — and confronted a confident and ascendant radical Islam and left it demoralized and discredited among its own host Arab and Muslim constituents.

"She was put on this earth to do two things: kill caribou and kick butt. She's all out of caribou."
-- Jonah Goldberg, National Review

"I would like to thank the US media for doing such a grand job this last week of lowering expectations by portraying Governor Palin - whoops, I mean Hick-Burg Mayor Palin - as a hillbilly know-nothing permapregnant ditz, half of whose 27 kids are the spawn of a stump-toothed uncle who hasn't worked since he was an extra in Deliverance.

How's that narrative holding up, geniuses? Almost as good as your "devoted husband John Edwards" routine?"
-- Mark Steyn, National Review

Apparently Obama hadn't heard about Palin being Governor of the State of Alaska, which has a budget in excess of $11 billion annually and more than 24,000 employees. Also, on Obama's theory, the act of running for President gives you the experience you need to qualify to be President. That's convenient for a guy who has accomplished so little in his career in public life.If our intrepid reporters could focus on something other than Bristol Palin for a moment, maybe they would notice that Obama continues to make a fool of himself on a near-daily basis.

Consider his claim during a news conference Wednesday in Israel that "just this past week, we passed out of the U.S. Senate Banking Committee, which is my committee, a bill to call for divestment from Iran."

His committee? Obama isn't even a member of the Banking Committee, let alone its chairman. So was it a self-promoting lie or a misstep? Only he knows.

...the Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of George McGovern, albeit without McGovern’s military and political record. The Democratic party is about to nominate a far-left candidate in the tradition of Michael Dukakis, albeit without Dukakis’s executive experience as governor. The Democratic party is about to nominate a far left candidate in the tradition of John Kerry, albeit without Kerry’s record of years of service in the Senate. The Democratic party is about to nominate an unvetted candidate in the tradition of Jimmy Carter, albeit without Jimmy Carter’s religious integrity as he spoke about it in 1976. Questions about all these attributes (from foreign policy expertise to executive experience to senatorial experience to judgment about foreign leaders to the instructors he has had in his cultural values) surround Barack Obama. And the Democratic party has chosen him.

Look, I understand that what your company is doing is, in all likelihood, legal. I do not, however, approve of a business model which seeks to fool people. Yes, I am sure the "Offer and Billing Details" explained that her credit card information would be used to charge her each month. Yes, I am sure she entered her email and hit OK. I am also sure (although, like I said, I will confirm it) that she didn't read those details. She probably thought she was still dealing with Shutterfly. She figured that she was just getting $10 bucks off her next order, with no strings attached, just as she gets those offers/coupons from Shutterfly in the regular mail.

You can rationalize it all day long, but I would wager a large sum that a *vast* majority of your "members" are unwitting. They made a purchase with some trusted vender, an offer popped up for some coupon, they figured they were still dealing with that vendor, hit OK, entered an email, and didn't give it another thought. Let's face it, people take their time and are mentally engaged *before* a purchase is made (picking out an item or comparing it) and *during* the purchase itself (carefully entering credit card information and whatnot). But, once the "Confirm Order" button is pressed, people are on mental-automatic. The purchase is done, no need to be that careful anymore. Oh, look, a $10 coupon! Sure, hit OK...

Not convinced? Then why not include text right next to, or above, the first OK button which says, "I agree to be billed monthly per these agreement terms," with the last two words made into a hyperlink to the "Offer and Billing Details". Hmmm? You see, the "success" of your business is based on people not noticing the billing. Do you really think most people (any?) will sign up to be billed $10 each month to save $10 on a purchase?

Still not convinced? Then why have I read on the internet many, many stories about others who have become unwitting members?

Mary, all that said, I appreciate your response and followup.

"In the four years since the inspectors left, intelligence reports show that Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile delivery capability, and his nuclear program. He has also given aid, comfort, and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members...

It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons. Should he succeed in that endeavor, he could alter the political and security landscape of the Middle East, which as we know all too well, effects American security.

This is a very difficult vote, this is probably the hardest decision I've ever had to make. Any vote that might lead to war should be hard, but I cast it with conviction."

Senator Hillary Clinton (Democrat, New York)Addressing the US SenateOctober 10, 2002

Captured Iraqi documents have uncovered evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism, including a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist and Islamic terrorist organizations. While these documents do not reveal direct coordination and assistance between the Saddam regime and the al Qaeda network, they do indicate that Saddam was willing to use, albeit cautiously, operatives affiliated with al Qaeda as long as Saddam could have these terrorist-operatives monitored closely. Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a "de facto" link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam’s use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime.

(As told by Ronald Reagan) "And once when Bill was asked what job he wanted in the Administration of his friend the President, he replied in his typically retiring and deferential way: "Ventriloquist."

"We're brainwashing our children," said Dr Gray, 78, a long-time professor at Colorado State University. "They're going to the Gore movie [An Inconvenient Truth] and being fed all this. It's ridiculous."

..."We'll look back on all of this in 10 or 15 years and realise how foolish it was," Dr Gray said.

..."The human impact on the atmosphere is simply too small to have a major effect on global temperatures," Dr Gray said.

..."It bothers me that my fellow scientists are not speaking out against something they know is wrong," he said. "But they also know that they'd never get any grants if they spoke out. I don't care about grants."

When did the Nobel Peace Prize go off the tracks? Today's award to Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" fits in with a subset of cosmopolitan frauds, fakers, murderers, thieves, and no-accounts going back about twenty years:

2005: MOHAMED ELBARADEI (joint winner). He's done such a nice job with Iran.

2002: JIMMY CARTER JR., former President of the United States of America. A true cosmopolitan, he has undermined the foreign policy of his own country and vouched for the bona fides of tyrants and murderers all over the world.

2001: UNITED NATIONS, New York, NY, USA. KOFI ANNAN, United Nations Secretary General. Among other things, respectively served as the vehicle for, and presided over, one of the biggest scams in history.

1994: YASSER ARAFAT (joint winner), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the PLO, President of the Palestinian National Authority for his efforts to create peace in the Middle East. A cold-blooded murderer before and after receiving the award.

1992: RIGOBERTA MENCHU TUM, Guatemala. Faker and author, sort of, of I, Rigoberta Menchu.

1988: THE UNITED NATIONS PEACE-KEEPING FORCES New York, NY, U.S.A. Notwithstanding rapes and sex abuse committed by the team in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea and the Congo, still doing fine work all over the world.

Keeping to the trend of politicized awards, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given jointly to Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In his initial statement, however, Gore explains that global warming isn't a political issue at all: "The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level."

Glad he cleared that up. I had been thinking it had something to do with science.

Al Gore’s award-winning climate change documentary was littered with nine inconvenient untruths, a judge ruled yesterday.

Mr Justice Burton identified nine significant errors within the former presidential candidate’s documentary as he assessed whether it should be shown to school children.

...In what is a rare judicial ruling on what children can see in the class-room, Mr Justice Barton was at pains to point out that the “apocalyptic vision” presented in the film was politically partisan and not an impartial analysis of the science of climate change.

The claim that sea levels could rise by 20ft “in the near future” was dismissed as “distinctly alarmist”. Such a rise would take place “only after, and over, millennia.

...Mr Gore’s suggestion that the Gulf Stream, that warms up the Atlantic ocean, would shut down was contradicted by the International Panel on Climate Change’s assessment that it was “very unlikely” to happen.

The drying of Lake Chad, the loss of Mount Kilimanjaro’s snows and Hurricane Katrina were all blamed by Mr Gore on climate change but the judge said the scientific community had been unable to find evidence to prove there was a direct link.

The drying of Lake Chad, the judge said, was “far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and overgrazing, and regional climate variability”.

The judge also said there was no proof to support a claim that polar bears were drowning while searching for icy habitats melted by global warming. The only drowned polar bears the court was aware of were four that died following a storm.

"When Thomas Friedman touts carbon dioxide as the cause of global warming in his column 'Doha and Dalian' (Sept. 20), I respond as a physicist that he cannot comprehend that it is still not proven that carbon dioxide emissions actually are causing global warming. Correlation does not prove Causation.

The Earth's climate changes all the time. Did carbon dioxide emissions cause the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings raised crops on Greenland's coast? What caused the cold climate from 1700 to 1850? In 1975, articles were published predicting we were entering a New Ice Age.

Reputable scientists oppose this unwarranted alarmist hysteria. If fanatic leftists who hate America's progressive capitalistic system had not opposed the building of nuclear power plants by wild allegations and interminable lawsuits, the United States could have built dozens of safe, modern reactors. These provide plentiful, reliable energy and, incidentally, emit zero carbon dioxide.

Understanding climate change is an extremely difficult scientific problem. Giant computers generating climate models cannot be trusted so far. As any computer person knows, garbage in means garbage out. If research suggests subtle variations in our Sun's radiation reaching Earth are causing global climate change, what would Friedman recommend?"

"The trend is certainly in the right direction," US military spokesman Rear Admiral Mark Fox told a press conference in Baghdad.

"The surge unquestionably is what has been the catalyst that has created the opportunity to have more forces operating in more places at the same time and to deny Al-Qaeda and the extremists safe-haven and to take away sanctuaries."

"The principle guiding my decisions on troop levels in Iraq is 'return on success.' The more successful we are, the more American troops can return home. ...

... Yet those of us who believe success in Iraq is essential to our security, and those who believe we should bring our troops home, have been at odds. Now, because of the measure of success we are seeing in Iraq, we can begin seeing troops come home.

The way forward I have described tonight makes it possible, for the first time in years, for people who have been on opposite sides of this difficult debate to come together."

"Chief Justice John Roberts has died in his summer home in Maine. No, not really, but we know you have your fingers crossed."

"Here is the most important thing Americans need to understand: We are finally getting somewhere in Iraq, at least in military terms."

"We were surprised by the gains we saw..."

"Today, morale is high. The soldiers and marines told us they feel that they now have a superb commander in Gen. David Petraeus; they are confident in his strategy, they see real results, and they feel now they have the numbers needed to make a real difference."

"America has shown by the resilience and bravery of its people from September 11 that while buildings can be destroyed, values are indestructable."

"We acknowledge the debt the world owes to the US for its leadership in this fight against international terrorism."

"I have always been an Atlanticist and a great admirer of the American spirit of enterprise and national purpose and commitment to opportunity to all."

"And as Prime Minister I want to do more to strengthen even further our relationship with the US."

"Because the ocean temperatures have not yet rebounded from the significant drop in late spring, we have decided to reduce our forecast numbers slightly," said Todd Crawford, a WSI seasonal forecaster.

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world...

"More than six months ago, I began writing this series, The Deniers. When I began, I accepted the prevailing view that scientists overwhelmingly believe that climate change threatens the planet. I doubted only claims that the dissenters were either kooks on the margins of science or sell-outs in the pockets of the oil companies.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped believing that a scientific consensus exists on climate change. Certainly there is no consensus at the very top echelons of scientists -- the ranks from which I have been drawing my subjects -- and certainly there is no consensus among astrophysicists and other solar scientists, several of whom I have profiled. If anything, the majority view among these subsets of the scientific community may run in the opposite direction. Not only do most of my interviewees either discount or disparage the conventional wisdom as represented by the IPCC, many say their peers generally consider it to have little or no credibility. In one case, a top scientist told me that, to his knowledge, no respected scientist in his field accepts the IPCC position."

"A: Well let me give you one fact first. In the first 30 feet of the atmosphere, on the average, outward radiation from the Earth, which is what CO2 is supposed to affect, how much [of the reflected energy] is absorbed by water vapor? In the first 30 feet, 80 percent, okay?

Q: Eighty percent of the heat radiated back from the surface is absorbed in the first 30 feet by water vapor…

A: And how much is absorbed by carbon dioxide? Eight hundredths of one percent. One one-thousandth as important as water vapor. You can go outside and spit and have the same effect as doubling carbon dioxide."

"I have no doubt that a trend of global warming exists," Griffin told Inskeep. "I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with.

To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change," Griffin said. "I guess I would ask which human beings — where and when — are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take."

We didn't think we'd see the day when a president-elect of France would be more appreciative of America's role in the world than one of our own former presidents.

Jimmy Carter, the man who makes Neville Chamberlain look like Dirty Harry, made his remarks about President Bush while promoting his audiobook series of Bible lessons for children. Jimmy, thou shalt not bear false witness against your president and country. Haven't you done enough damage? If you want to see our worst ex-president, look in the mirror.

"From this article, we learn from the actual data that (a) sea level is generally rising, (b) the rate of rise decelerated during the 20th century, (c) the rate of sea level rise over the past two decades has been both positive and negative, (d) the rate of sea level rise has been quite small over the last few years, and (e) stations can witness an increase or decrease of sea level quite independently of one another."

"I fear that attempts are being made to purposefully subvert the public understanding of the nature of science in order to achieve political goals," he wrote in an e-mail. "Science is not about consensus, and to invoke this raises the hackles of scientists such as myself. The lure of politics and publicity is no doubt seductive, but it nevertheless amazes me that so many scientists have jumped on the bandwagon of consensus science, apparently forgetting or ignoring the sad history of consensus science."

"A sense of imbalance is everywhere. Imams call Jews 'pigs and apes.' The Pope is threatened for his dry recitation of history. Cartoonists, novelists, filmmakers, and opera producers are all promised death or beheading, while the worst sort of racist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian hatred is broadcast and published in state-run Arab media."

"By 2050, 60 percent of Italians will have no brothers, no sisters, no cousins, no aunts, no uncles. The big Italian family, with papa pouring the vino and mama spooning out the pasta down an endless table of grandparents and nieces and nephews, will be gone, no more..."

Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused his dentist's Novocain during a root canal? He wanted to transcend dental medication.

A man wanted to invest in Irish real estate. He planned on Dublin his money.

Mahatma Gandhi, as you know, walked barefoot most of the time, which produced an impressive set of calluses on his feet. He also ate very little, which made him rather frail and with his odd diet, he suffered from bad breath. This made him a super-callused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis.

Real after-tax income per person has risen by 10 percent since President Bush took office.

Real wages rose 1.8 percent over the past 12 months through February, which is substantially faster than the average rate of the late 1990s economy.

The economy has now experienced more than five years of uninterrupted growth, averaging 3.0 Percent a year since 2001.

Since the first quarter of 2001, productivity growth has averaged 2.8 percent, which is well above average productivity growth in the 1990s, 1980s, and 1970s.

Rove was on the campus to talk to the College Republicans, but when he got outside more than a dozen students began throwing things at him and at his car, an American University spokesperson said.

"It is simply staggering to me that Pelosi refuses to stand beside America's closest ally. I literally would not have thought this possible, until I saw it this week."