With Josh: Global warming a fraud

 

When I reached for the Plain Dealer today for my first word from the  outside world, I found this headline commanding the front page:

    Mandel blasts president, Brown, calls global warming 'inconclusive'

Whoa there, pony. Was Republican Josh off the reservation again? Well, it's true that he was down in Tampa to impress his GOP friends that he's a candidate of  action wherever there's trouble on the planet.

I pressed on to read the story, but got no further after I arrived at this paragraph:

'The state treasurer [Mandel] thinks scientific research on the matter is "inconclusive and riddled with fraud."

It quickly recalled Mandel's recent visit to Ohio's grimy coal mining district where the whiz kid  promised on the bible of his billionaire energy princes that he would end the "war on coal."  As one who grew up among coal mining families I wondered why he didn't bother to mention  the early deaths of miners  in the hands of negligent mine owners.

The above photo of melting ice fields  is from the on-line National Geographic, the left-wing, radical pubication that has never seen a global warming report  that it didn't embrace.  The heading on the photo said...

          The planet is heating up - and fast

Josh, Josh:  Among the magazine's listed advisors is a guy you doubtless know:  David Koch.  He couldn't be happy with National Geo.  But at least he can be confident that he has you in his pocket.

UPDATE:  Late word from the NY Times Monday afternoon:

"The amount of sea ice in the Arctic has fallen to the lowest level on record ,  a confirmation of the drastic  warming in the region and a likely harbinger of larger changes to come."

Pick up the phone, Guv. Guess who's on the other end

COLUMNIST GEORGE WILL has been on an odyssey to herald the new generation of conservative governors that could pass a screen test as, say, a presidential candidate. And he is doing it with extraordinary grammar. I know of no other national pundit who would dare begin a column, as he did today, with the word "Hitherto". But that's George Will for you, ramping up the language to charm those who have no clue about the points that he's trying to make. He's lately added Govs. John Kasich and Scott Walker to his honor roll, going so far as to compare Walker to Ronald Reagan. It's a common Republican desparture point in elevating a current prospect to the Reagan legend.

There are instant benefits for guys like Kasich and Walker. As a national columnist,

Will's often inscrutable insights reach readers - at least those who still find their way to an Op-ed page - from coast to coast. With the columnist's endorsement, they might close ranks on a consensus for the next fellow in the White House. He praises Walker for being "serene in the center of this storm" as the governor sits for an interview beneath a portrait of Ronald Reagan. And later he declares being impressed by Walker's "calm comportment" in this crises.

Will's in-and-out visits to crises spots satisfy his pedantic yearnings to create a medieval America in which only the fittest survive. He's attracted to the modern version of Republican governors these days much as hungry sperm whales use echo location to find their fish.

As for Walker's crisis in attempting to dislocate public employe unions, he attempts to create the silly argument that everything in Wisconsin would be fine if those out-of-state union hacks weren't crossing borders to create havoc. As I've previously noted, his own out- of- state sponsors are the billionaire Koch brothers, whose money has been turning up quite often in political campagns. The Koch front group, Americans for Prosperity, has just bought $342,000 worth of TV and radio ads in Wisconsin asking people to "stand with Walker", while bashing unions and President Obama.

But even Walker's crusade, marked by the religious fervency of a man who is a son of a Baptist minister, can run off the highway in times like these.. A New York blogger, BuffaloBeast, tricked him into a 20-minute phone conversation in which the blogger pretended he was David Koch. During the conversation, Walker openly described his plans to crush the union.

To the credit of George Will's brief but studied assessment of the governor, Walker was serene throughout the phone call.