From those wonderful folks who brought you Walter Cronkite politicizing the Tet Offensive, Dan Rather and RatherGate, and Katie Couric writing Christmas poems in praise of ObamaCare comes this gem from CBS anchor Scott Pelley, speaking to Quinnipiac University:

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

“‘No such thing as ethical oil,’ Al Gore tells Toronto audience.”

— The Toronto Globe and Mail, yesterday.

“Al Gore is now richer than Mitt Romney – and it’s all thanks to big oil.”

— The London Telegraph, January 12th, 2013.

(Via Colby Cosh.)

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Totally, you guys:

Left-wing radical Bill Ayers, a longtime friend of President Barack Obama, recently defended the series of bombings that he carried out as a member of the Weather Underground, saying that his bombings were not like the Boston Marathon attack and that America is the most violent country that has ever been created.

Ayers — who participated in a series of anti-Vietnam War bombings in the early 1970s including an attack on New York City police department headquarters and the Pentagon — answered an Akron Beacon Journal reporter’s questions after giving a keynote speech at an event commemorating the anniversary of the 1970 Kent State National Guard shootings.

Ayers said that there is no equivalence between his bombings and the deadly bombings that rocked the Boston Marathon.

“What I did was some destruction of property to issue a scream and cry against an illegal war in which 6,000 people a week are being killed,” Ayers said.

Ayers reportedly said that the United States is the most violent country that has ever been created, and said that Republican Senator and Vietnam War hero John McCain committed daily war crimes.

“Six thousand a week being killed and I destroyed some property. Show me the equivalence. You should ask John McCain that question … I’m against violence,” Ayers said.

Well, the Weathermen certainly had a funny way of expressing their pacifism back then.  These days, we tend to remember the Weathermen solely for the Pentagon incident (particularly after the New York Times’ fawning profile of Ayers that ran, with horrible synchronicity, on September 11th, 2001), and the botched Fort Dix bomb, but according to Jonah Goldberg in Liberal Fascism, they were remarkably active in the late ’60s and early ’70s:

Many of us forget that the Weather Underground bombing campaign was not a matter of a few isolated incidents. From September 1969 to May 1970, Rudd and his co-revolutionaries on the white radical left committed about 250 attacks, or almost one terrorist bombing a day (government estimates put that number much higher). During the summer of 1970, there were twenty bombings a week in California. The bombings were the backbeat to the symphony of violence, much of it rhetorical, that set the score for the New Left in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rudd captured the tone perfectly: “It’s a wonderful feeling to hit a pig. It must be a really wonderful feeling to kill a pig or blow up a building.” [Mark Rudd is now is now "a math teacher at a community college in Albuquerque, New Mexico," Jonah adds elsewhere -- Ed] “The real division is not between people who support bombings and people who don’t,” explained a secret member of a “bombing collective,” but “between people who will do them and people who are too hung up on their own privileges and security to take those risks.”

Wikipedia has a page titled “List of Weatherman Actions.” It’s certainly extensive; it may even be accurate.

At Hot Air today, Allahpundit adds, “Good news from Bill Ayers: My terrorism was nothing like the terrorism in Boston:”

The Tsarnaevs wanted to kill people, whereas the Weather Underground mostly wanted to blow up property except for that time they built nail bombs to kill soldiers at a dance at Fort Dix but ended up blowing themselves up instead. Oh, and the time they probably killed a cop in San Francisco and wounded nine others. There’s the big distinction.

Two mild surprises here. One: Ayers doesn’t attempt to defend the Tsarnaevs’ motive, even though it was anti-war of a sort. This is a prime opportunity to lecture about “blowback” by the oppressed people of the Muslim world who object to U.S. imperialism, etc etc etc, even while condemning the tactics, but he doesn’t take it. Maybe the politics of defending the Tsarnaevs, however mildly, are too toxic even for him. Two: Almost 50 years later, he’s still looking for ways to defend the Weathermen’s tactics even though he loses more than he gains by it. You would think he’d regret setting bombs, even “just” to destroy property, if only because it made it easier for hawks at the time to discredit the wider left as radicals and terrorists. Nope.

Regarding those who would lionize such tactics, Jason Mattera asks the questions the MSM refused to when they gave Robert Redford’s new film an extensive tongue bath:

In his review of Redford’s pro-Weathermen movie (which he grades as a “B” — insert your own jokes here), Burlington (NJ) Country Times film critic Lou Gaul writes:

Redford, who earned an Oscar as best director for “Ordinary People” (1980), obviously wanted to tell this cautionary story, and his limited production budget of $2 million caused the film to look more like a cable movie than a major motion picture.

Thanks to his filmmaking status, Redford was able to attract top talents willing to work for much less than their usual salaries to be part of the ensemble. They include Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Anna Kendrick, Terrence Howard, Chris Cooper, Brit Marling, Richard Jenkins, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Christie and Nick Nolte.

A throwback film, “The Company You Keep” provides a welcome twist at the end and enough political ideas to generate post-screening discussions.

Funny though, as Ed Morrissey writes, linking to Mattera’s new video, “Hey, didn’t Redford make The Company You Keep to start a ‘conversation’? Looks like Redford isn’t interested in conversing these days.” Well, it depends on who he’s conversing with. Compare the inconvenient truths Mattera asks with this “interview:”

Though to be fair, fellow leftist George Stephanopoulos was at least able to get this moment on record:

Reminiscing on his own past, the liberal Hollywood star recounted, “When I was younger, I was very much aware of the movement. I was more than sympathetic, I was probably empathetic because I believed it was time for a change.”

After Stephanopoulos wondered, “Even when you read about bombings,” Redford responded, “All of it. I knew that it was extreme and I guess movements have to be extreme to some degree.

If the budget of The Company You Keep was indeed two million dollars, as Gaul wrote in his review, then it’s turned a profit at the box office; though a very small one. I don’t think Redford’s going to keep up the payments on his environmentally correct estate on its royalties, however:

Oh, and speaking of “the company you keep,” at the end of a lengthy round-up of Ayers’ recent appearance in the news, Jim Geraghty adds the Obama connection:

Ayers recently elaborated on his relationship with Barack Obama and his political allies earlier in life:

David Axelrod said we were friendly, that was true; we served on a couple of boards together, that was true; he held a fundraiser in our living room, that was true; Michelle [Obama] and Bernardine were at the law firm together, that was true. Hyde Park in Chicago is a tiny neighborhood, so when he said I was “a guy around the neighborhood,” that was true.

As Ben Smith summarized:

Ayers and Dohrn, who have been semi-officially rehabilitated in Chicago but still inspire a wide range of feelings, played a modest but real part in launching Obama’s political career.

Fancy that: Even Obama flack Ben Smith can airbrush Ayers’ Obama connection away through sufficient Bensmithing.

Finally, some food for thought as an exit quote:

“You need to find a way to live your life, that it doesn’t make a mockery of your values.” – Bill Ayers

— Great Minds Quotes (@GreatestQuotes) August 19, 2012

Great minds, indeed.

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“How do you top making national news for bigotry?”, Dan Gainor asks at CNS News. “Trying getting people to ‘Give Up (Eating) Hamburgers to Stop Climate Change.’”

For loony lefty syndicated columnist David Sirota, it’s all just another day at the office. Sirota made national news for his bizarre and bigoted hope that the Boston bomber would turn out to be “a white American.”

Fresh off that fiasco, Sirota has turned his sights to changing the climate by changing America’s diet. According to Sirota’s May 2 column [at Salon.com] , “the fastest way to reduce climate change” simply “requires us all to eat fewer animal products.” In cast that wasn’t sufficiently clear, he added that “we are incinerating the planet and dooming future generations simply because too many of us like to eat cheeseburgers.” Sirota’s article on the left-wing site Salon included a photo of what appeared to be a bacon cheeseburger with an egg on top of it.

“That’s right; essentially, if every fourth time someone craved, say, beef, chicken or cow milk they instead opted for a veggie burger, a bean burrito or water, we have a chance to halt the emergency,” he added.

But Sirota wasn’t optimistic that conservatives would join him in his veggie crusade. “I’m sure some conservatives will read this column and send me email smugly pledging to eat even more meat than they already do, just to make some incoherent point about freedom.” Somehow “freedom” is always incoherent to the left. No matter. We either stop eating what we want or we are endangering what Sirota called our “ecological survival.”

You know what else the left has claimed exacerbates global warming? Air conditioning:

. . .as science writer Stan Cox argues in his new book, “Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer),” the dizzying rise of air conditioning comes at a steep personal and societal price.

• We stay inside longer,
• exercise less, and
• get sick more often — and
• the electricity used to power all that A.C. is helping push the fast-forward button on global warming.

The invention has also changed American politics: Love it or hate it, refrigerated cooling has been a major boon to the Republican Party. The advent of A.C. helped launch the massive Southern and Western population growth that’s transformed our electoral map in the last half century. Cox navigates all of these scientific and social angles with relative ease, providing a clear explanation of how A.C. made the leap from luxury to necessity in the United States and examining how we can learn to manage the addiction before we refrigerate ourselves into the apocalypse.

That’s according to a 2010 article written by those ace climate scientists at…Salon. (Link safe, goes to Stacy McCain’s blog.) When I see the announcement that Salon has gone offline, having voluntarily given up its air conditioned Internet server rooms for the sake of preserving Gaia and staving off “the apocalypse,” I’m willing to revisit the cheeseburger argument.

…Well, this cheeseburger argument, at least.

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Oh, that liberal fascism: If your first thought when looking at the above image from François Truffaut’s 1966 film version of Bradbury’s seminal Fahrenheit 451 is: “Burning books? Capital idea, old sport!”, you might just be cut out for academia:  “San Jose State University Meteorology decides burning books they don’t agree with is better than reading them,” as spotted by Anthony Watts:

From the Fahrenheit 451 department comes this indictment of California’s higher education’s “tolerance” for opposing views. When I first got the tip on this, I thought to myself “nobody can be this stupid to photograph themselves doing this” but, here they are, right from the San Jose State University Meteorology Department web page:

Here’s the photo of San Jose State’s book burners in action:

Click over to Watts’ blog for additional background and a much larger version of the photo, plus the screen cap of the San Jose State University Meteorology Department web page, before it was tossed down the Memory Hole, to mix dystopian science fiction metaphors, both of which were written as warnings, not how-to guides.

This 21st century example of book burning brings to mind the observation that Russell Kirk made in his profile of Bradbury from that tumultuous year that turned America upside down, 1968:

Some librarians, too, have taken alarm. Bradbury’s stories are disturbing! No disturbances can be permitted in this perfect American culture of ours. In error, a company which distributes educational books included among a consignment of books for children one copy of Fahrenheit 451. A female librarian detected this work of heresy, and fired off a letter of furious protest to the wholesaler. How dared they send such a dreadful book? “I took it right out in back and burned it.” Tomorrow is already here.

And it also brings to mind the late Michael Crichton’s observations on global warming as a religion:

As Crichton observed in 2003, “I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form.” But like radical Islam, radical environmentalism is a rather punitive religion. When does the enlightenment arrive, and the book burning, and related hellfire and brimstone-themed imagery stop?

Update: Dubbing SJSU the “Green Weenie of the Week,” Steve Hayward quips, “Curious: just what is the carbon footprint of burning a book they dislike?  Did they get a permit from the local air pollution control district?”

Heh. Perhaps NBC’s David Gregory could investigate those topics.

Plus a great comment on SJSU found here: “If you lived in the 60′s, you might recall that the radical protests on campus were all about the ‘free speech movement.’” I guess we’ve come circle where now that the radicals control the campus, free speech is not to be tolerated.”

Update: Welcome readers clicking in from Mark Steyn’s post at the the Corner, with the brilliant headline of “Goebbel Warming.”

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Now is the time when we juxtapose, Small Dead Animals-style:

It was undoubtedly impolitic for him to single out Las Vegas, rather than, say, Atlantic City, as a particularly wasteful destination. But as an objective matter, his broader point is correct: Americans need to tighten their belts — for quite a while, probably. During the boom, the ratio of household debt to household income reached 128 percent in 2008, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, far more than leading economic competitors such as Germany, Japan or China. This burden was concentrated most heavily on the middle class, McKinsey notes. And the proof that it was not sustainable is all around us, in the form of personal bankruptcy filings and foreclosures.

The more difficult question is whether this is a reality America should merely endure or actively embrace. For generations, we have built our economy on ever-increasing consumption, with the result (among others) that a metropolitan area of two million people has arisen over the last 40 years in the Nevada desert — based essentially on hedonism.

Far more important, perhaps, than his inconsistent observations about Vegas, is the fact that Obama seems to favor the latter option, embracing a less consumption-oriented economic future. In a speech marking the anniversary of his stimulus plan, he observed that “the jobs of the 21st century are in areas like clean energy and technology, advanced manufacturing, new infrastructure. That kind of economy requires us to consume less and produce more; to import less and export more.”

— “Obama’s hard truth: Americans must consume less,” the Washington Post, February 19, 2010.

Parker asked Zakaria if he had faith the American people could handle the fiscal discipline he advocated. Zakaria used the platform as an opportunity to attack Americans and refute the notion “the American people are wonderful.” His solution: Less consumption by the American people.

“No, I think the people are the big problem,” Zakaria said. “I mean, Americans — everybody wants to say the American people are so wonderful. You know, I think that when they come to recognize that they have to make sacrifices too that it’s not just wasteful — they need to have — they need to recognize that some of what’s going to happen here is fewer. They have to consume fewer things. They have to accept slightly higher taxes. And in the long run, you will have a much better economy.”

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results. That was then:

This is now, writes Betsy Newmark:

This is a striking statistic I recently ran across in preparing to teach the post-war period for my A.P. European History class: there are more people in Britain today working for in Indian restaurants than in the coal, steel, and railroad industries combined. On one hand, that is not so surprising considering the state of those industries in today’s Britain. However, in the grand scope of British history, I found that statistic truly startling.

Is it all that surprising, considering where 21st century “Progressivism” currently stands on these various industries? Its current strange obsession with “high-speed railroads” (or “high-speed intercontinental railroads” to borrow one of BHO’s malapropisms) is one of the last vestiges of the original left’s early 20th century obsession with Big Iron. And other than the railroad industry, steel is considered superfluous by much of the left, considering the environmentally correct left’s obsession with the BANANA mindset — “Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.”

And speaking of the environmentally correct left, as Newsbusters noted at the start of the month, when a CNN talking head claimed that Marget Thatcher’s reforms “decimated” the British coal industry:

Reporting on the late Margaret Thatcher’s legacy on Monday, CNN correspondent Max Foster hyped that she “decimated entire industries” in Britain and “decimated communities across the UK.” He also cited Gerry Adams, the public face of the IRA for decades, as a valid critic of Thatcher.

In addition to citing praise for Thatcher, Foster offered a blistering critique on Monday’s Starting Point: “This was the prime minister that decimated entire industries in the United Kingdom during her period in power as she broke the miners unions in a push towards privatization to create a more flexible British economy, which it has become. But she decimated communities across the UK. And a lot of people absolutely despise her legacy.”

As opposed to the president who promises to bankrupt them, to whom the network bakes cakes and gives fistbumps in supplication:

Meanwhile back in the States, Reason’s Matt Welch has some fun teeing off on a hapless opponent who wants to bankrupt the rest of America’s industries. Well, even faster than Barry does: Welch catches Lee Siegel of Tina Brown’s Daily Beast professing to believe:

Just think what America would look like without its mostly Southern states. (We could retain “America”: they could call themselves “Smith & Wesson” or “Coca-Cola” or something like that.) Universal health care. No guns. Strong unions. A humane minimum wage. A humane immigration policy. High revenues from a fair tax structure. A massive public-works program. Legal gay marriage. A ban on carbon emissions. Electric cars. Stronger workplace protections. Extended family leave from work in case of pregnancy or illness. Longer unemployment benefits. In short, a society on a par with most of the rest of the industrialized world—a place whose politics have finally caught up with its social and economic realities.

As Matt responds:

A ban on carbon emissions. How many living-wage jobs do you expect to produce through bicycle power, President Gilligan? And at a time when the labor force participation rate is at its lowest since the truly shitty year of 1979, notice how the presumed consensus economic thinking would have us take that sad base for granted, then jack up taxes, government spending, and incentives to not work. What would the unemployment rate be in Northistan, 20 percent? Thirty?

But if you aren’t simply trolling for links, and really believe in your heart of hearts that there should “a ban on carbon emissions,” shouldn’t you be off the Internet yourself? Or do the carbons admitted by the equipment necessary to run the Internet don’t count? As Virginia Postrel told C-Span’s Brian Lamb in 1999 when promoting The Future and its Enemies:

The Khmer Rouge sought to start over at year zero, and to sort of create the kind of society that very civilized, humane greens write about as though it were an ideal. I mean, people who would never consider genocide*. But I argue that if you want to know what that would take, look at Cambodia: to empty the cities and turn everyone into peasants again. Even in a less developed country, let alone in someplace like the United States, that these sort of static utopian fantasies are just that.

Which brings us back to where we started, come to think of it.

* Don’t be too sure about that.

Related: I’ve been meaning to link to this for a while now; while Matt Welch spots one eco-weenie who wants “A ban on carbon emissions,” Steve Green of Vodkapundit spots another in the Atlantic who ponders “What If We Never Run Out of Oil?” and declares it “a nightmare.” As Steve writes, “I am sicking and f—ing tired of relatively rich liberal hating on affordable energy. F— them.”

In-f—ing-deed.

(Imagine if there’s no oil. And then, if you’re Atlantic, imagine how Xenu will fuel his interstellar DC-8s.)

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When the Bush administration coined the phrase “The War on Terror” after 9/11, it was a politically correct expedient for not wanting to reference the religion of the vast majority of its participants, and/or the region of the world that spawned them. As Diana West wrote in 2007′s The Death of the Grown-Up, “There is a hollowness to the whole enterprise…a barren chamber where the empty slogan ‘war on terror’ echoes on without meaning:”

That is, terror is a tactic. You don’t make war on a tactic; you make war on the people who use it. Imagine if FDR had declared “the war on sneak attack” or the “war on blitzkrieg.” It doesn’t make sense and neither does “war on terror.” And not only does it not make sense, it also uncovers our biggest handicap going in: that perilous lack of cultural confidence, that empty core at our heart.

Naturally, the Bush administration having already censored themselves in the early naughts, their truly PC successors in the White House would go even further, as Victor Davis Hanson recently noted, when discussing the Tsarnaev family with Mona Charen at Ricochet:

I mean, he could have easily stayed in Chechnya if it was so wonderful, and dealt with the Russians, but his family chose not to. So they came out to an embracing, affable society that allowed them a second chance in a way that millions would have only dreamed of. And then his reaction is to do that to the society that nourished him.

And it’s disgusting, but it’s almost as if, the more that he sees this popular culture that we’ve been talking about. And then he sees the official reaction: “man-caused disasters,” “overseas contingency operations”;  can’t use the word “terrorist”; can’t use the word “Islamist”; gotta create an idea of “workplace violence” for Maj. Hasan. He gets the other message that we’re sort of so easy-going that nothing really gets us upset. And instead of having respect for that liberality, he grows contemptuous of it.

But while the “Progressive” overculture apparently can’t call terrorists terrorists now, it can call everything else that. QED:

Why do liberals consider domestic violence “terrorism” but they’re afraid to call real terrorism what it is? twitter.com/caseykim12/sta…

— CG Casey Kim (@caseykim12) April 28, 2013

And Ace notes how the Washington Post’s tut-tutting article on a recent conservative sting video documenting late term abortions concludes:

An antiabortion group that mounted a six-month undercover investigation has released videos this week that raise questions about what might happen to a baby as a result of an unsuccessful abortion.

One video features a D.C. doctor, Cesare Santangelo, who said that in the unlikely event that an abortion resulted in a live birth, “we would not help it.” Santangelo was answering repeated questions from an undercover operative about what would happen, hypothetically, if she gave birth after an unsuccessful abortion.

…

“I mean, technically, you know, legally, we would be obligated to help it, you know, to survive, but . . . it probably wouldn’t,” Santangelo is shown telling the woman, who was 24 weeks pregnant. “It’s all in how vigorously you do things to help a fetus survive at this point.”

…

He said he was “tripped up” by a hypothetical at a moment when he was trying to reassure a client. “Once the baby is born, it’s out of everybody’s hands, and the baby has rights, too,” he said. “I understand that and I support that.”

* * * * *

He said he has not watched the video because “I don’t like to feed into these people. I really consider them terrorists.”

As with numerous papers in 2009 condemning James O’Keefe’s ACORN sting, I await the blanket condemnation by the Post and its subsidiaries of CBS’s long-running 60 Minutes series. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in early 2001, before 9/11 and the birth of the Blogosphere:

60 Minutes has used secret cameras for decades and earned awards and ratings for it. But when 60 Minutes used a hidden camera to snoop on another journalist a few years ago, heads exploded in the hallowed halls of elite journalism. Why? Because we don’t do that sort of thing to our own. We only screw outsiders. Why do you think the media despised Linda Tripp so? It wasn’t just that she made life for Bill Clinton so uncomfortable; she was a scab, using the very techniques that thousands of journalists use each and every day. And she did it to protect herself! Nevertheless, when a private citizen employs such tactics she’s seen as an immoral betrayer of a friend. When a journalist does it, she’s a “news hound” — and an ethical one at that.

So in the future, will the left declare everyone a terrorist for 15 minutes? Of course. And the future is now.

Oh and by the way, the real terrorism? No need to worry about it, when there are much more abstract “crises” to obsess on. While I was poking around my archives the other day, I came across this 2008 quote from Nanny Bloomberg:

“Terrorists kill people. Weapons of mass destruction have the potential to kill an enormous amount of people,” Mr. Bloomberg told reporters after addressing the U.N. General Assembly, but “global warming in the long term has the potential to kill everybody.”

Yes, it’s almost as lethal as a 64-oz bottle of Coke.

Or as Mark Steyn’s latest column on the euphemistic language employed by the media to cover (0r not) the Gosnell trial and the Tsarnaev Brothers concludes:

You can understand why American progressivism would rather avert its gaze. Out there among the abortion absolutists, they’re happy to chit-chat about the acceptable parameters of the “collapsing of the skull,” but the informed general-interest reader would rather it all stayed at the woozy, blurry “woman’s right to choose” level.

We’re collapsing our own skulls here — the parameters in which we allow ourselves to think about abortion, welfare, immigration, terrorism, Islam shrink remorselessly, not least at the congressional level. Maybe if we didn’t collapse the skulls of so many black babies in Philadelphia, we wouldn’t need to import so many excitable young Chechens. But that’s thinking outside the box, and the box is getting ever smaller, like a nice, cozy cocoon in which we’re always warm and safe. Like — what’s the word? — a womb.

We’re certainly collapsing our own vocabulary, as a certain Mr. Eric Blair predicted 65 years ago:

Update: So what happens when the Newspeak Dictionary shrinks even further? Headlines such as this one at The Hill today: “Dem resolution warns climate change could push women to ‘transactional sex,’” with the latest PC euphemisms for both “global warming” and prostitution in one silly headline, reporting on an even more ridiculous bill.

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“Hyundai Europe ad uses fake suicide attempt to sell zero-emissions car,” as spotted by Jim Treacher:

“WARNING: This depicts a suicide attempt,” Treacher adds:

A bunch of highly paid, highly educated people conceived, produced, and released the following ad. Apparently, at no point in the entire process did any of them utter these words: “Hey, is this really such a good idea?”

Hyundai America is disavowing the ad, saying they had nothing to do with it. I know it’s a big company, but do these guys talk to each other? Nobody zipped out a quick e-mail or anything? “FYI, over here we’re totally running with the suicide angle in the new ad. Gonna be SO SWEET!!”

But we’ve seen this movie several times before, haven’t we? For those with sufficiently strong stomachs, let’s take a look back at some of the strange and grisly products produced when Big Warming and Big Advertising intersect.

Back in the fall of 2010, there was the British “No Pressure” video, which implied that if anyone disagreed with taking drastic action against “global warming” — which, after all, is “an ecological Kristallnacht,” as Al Gore said, before he sold his TV channel to Big Oil for a $100 million paycheck, they should be vaporized:

A year prior, the World Wildlife Fund released the ad below, which compared global warming to 9/11. At first they denied signing off on the ad, then eventually came clean, as Ace noted in September of 2009:

Oh, they originally claimed the ad was utterly unauthorized. Just some crazy kids in the copy room smokin’ the wacky tabackie and gettin’ all kinds of mischievous shenanigans.

Now comes a bit more of that sweet, sweet nuance.

Sergio Valente, president of DDB Brasil, said the ad was presented to the WWF in Brazil in December 2008 and approved; it then ran once in a small local paper.”When I saw it, I said stop running that ad,” Mr. Valente said.

Running an ad once is often a tactic to make it awards-show eligible, and “Tsunami” somehow ended up among a bunch of the agency’s submissions to this year’s One Show in New York…

After the WWF appeared to initially deny approving the ad, DDB Brasil and the WWF hammered out a statement posted in Portuguese on both groups’ Brazilian websites Wednesday afternoon apologizing for the ad and attributing it to “the inexperience of some professionals on both sides, and not bad faith or disrespect toward American suffering.”

Run an edgy (oooh!) ad once, get the buzz and the rewards, then claim that no one affiliated with your organization had anything at all to do with it.

Pretty tired of this stupid dance. An ad agency does not release confidential work-product of its client without someone somewhere signing off on it.

A couple of months later, about five minutes before the phrase “Hide the Decline” entered into the collective consciousness, a British campaign appropriately named “Plane Stupid” killed off dozens of digital polar bears to shame frequent air travelers into flying less. Curiously, our environmentally obsessed president, and jet-setting celebrities who pay lip service to being “eco-conscious,” such as Leonardo DiCaprio, John Travolta, and Harrison Ford (who admits to taking to the skies in his private plane when he wants to pick up a cheeseburger in a hurry), haven’t taken this message to heart:

The previous year had also seen more pretend polar bears killed off by Big Warming. As Tim Blair’s blog spotted in December of 2009, “In Brisbane, campaigners tied nooses around the necks of giant soft toy polar bears and threw them off balconies and bridges”:

Human representatives have also been mock-hanged in the proverbial effort to “raise consciousness” regarding the environment; in the fall of 2010, Andrew Bolt, another Australian journalist, spotted this disturbing image:

As I wrote in October of 2010:

Writing in Australia’s Herald Sun, Bolt notes that the photo below is a screen capture of a flier promoting a tradeshow last year put on in Cannes by ACT-Responsible — the ACT stands for “Advertising Community Together.” Not at all surprisingly, Kofi Annan was announced as attending, meaning that presumably he was OK with this image.

Around that time, and after viewing the “No Pressure” ad above, James Taranto gave this sick leftwing obsession a name: the “Green Supremacists”:

What kind of people blow up children?

White supremacists, for one example. On the morning of Sept. 15, 1963, members of a Ku Klux Klan “splinter group” set off dynamite under the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., killing four girls: Denise McNair, Addie Mae Collins, Carole Robertson and Cynthia Wesley. Denise was 11; the other three were 14.

Islamic supremacists, for another example. Groups like Hamas and al Qaeda not only attack civilians indiscriminately but frequently employ Muslim children as suicide bombers. Our friend Brooke Goldstein made a whole movie about it.

There’s a new kind of supremacist on the scene: green supremacists. They haven’t blown up any children–not in real life. But they’ve been thinking about it.

A British outfit called the 10:10 Campaign hired Richard Curtis, a writer and producer of cinematic comedies, to produce a four-minute video promoting its effort to encourage people to cut “carbon emissions.” The result, titled “No Pressure,” struck James Delingpole, a global-warming skeptic who writes for London’s Daily Telegraph, as “deliciously, unspeakably, magnificently bleeding awful.” He’s being too kind.

As Taranto added:

The ad has drawn a few defenses, mostly on the ground that it’s intended to be humorous. Typical is Jim Edwards of CBS Interactive, who faults 10:10 for backing away from the video rather than “standing proud and telling the deniers to suck it up”:

Whatever. No one but the most extreme climate change denier believes this is actually what environmentalists want. It’s obviously just a joke outrageous enough to actually get people’s attention.

But a joke at whose expense? If a “climate change denier” had made such a video in order to lampoon global warmists as fanatical and antihuman, the effort would have been denounced as invidious and over the top–and rightly, or so we would have said a week ago anyway.

No, this video was made by green supremacists themselves, and with a high degree of technical proficiency. As 10:10 itself observed in a statement (since removed from its website), the video required the efforts of “50+ film professionals and 40+ actors and extras.” Blogger David Burge notes that “somehow, throughout this entire process, not one of the hundreds of people involved seemed to have questioned the wisdom of an advertising message advocating the violent, sudden death of people who disagree with it.”

One may hope that Jim Edwards is right when he denies that “this is actually what environmentalists want.” But it’s bad enough that this is what they fantasize about–and that they manifestly felt no inhibition about airing such a depraved fantasy in public.

And they do so over and over again. The Mad Men TV series is a weekly effort at painting ’60s-era advertising professionals as a venal, cut-throat lot. But these nightmarish ads indicate that if anything, their morals have gotten immeasurably worse, particularly as they’ve discovered religion:

Update: Allahpundit has some thoughts on Hyundai’s new ad, and concludes:

Consider this an improvement, in fact, over environmental-minded ads of yesteryear. I’m old to enough remember when global-warming activists thought it’d be keen to raise awareness by showing kids getting blown up for failing to reduce their carbon footprint. Now we’ve got depressed people’s lives being saved by the absence of carbon monoxide in their exhaust. Messaging status: Refined.

Heh.™

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Today is “Earth Day” according to the left, though after last week’s reality wake-up call, the idea of spending the day worshiping Gaia rings even more false than usual, particularly since (a) Al Gore looked around, figured everything was cool, and cashed out his chips to Big Oil and (b) Gaia is doing just fine these days, thankyouverymuch:

The Environmental Protection Agency late last month proposed strict new “clean fuel” standards on gasoline. The EPA said the so-called Tier 3 rule would cut emissions of smog-forming pollutants, as well as toxic emissions like benzene.

What the EPA didn’t say was that levels of these pollutants have been falling steadily for years, and would continue to fall even without the new rule, which the oil industry says will cost tens of billions of dollars.

Indeed, a fact that won’t get much attention on Earth Day — April 22 — is that pollution has been falling across the board for decades, even while the nation’s population and economy have expanded. Overall air pollution levels dropped 62% from 1990 to 2012, while GDP grew 69% and population climbed 26%.

Everything has seen declines: carbon monoxide, soot, sulfur dioxide, ozone, lead and others. Many are now below the EPA’s safety threshold.

Or as Wired Magazine notes, “Luckily, our science writers of the 1990s were wrong about almost everything.” And while Wired wasn’t around before the 1990s, science writers in the 1970s were wrong about almost everything, too:

Kenneth Watt, 1970;

“The world has been chilling sharply for about twenty years. If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder in the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us into an ice age.”

Who’s laughing now?

But we must always pretend there’s a crisis. Quoting author Eric Hoffer, Thomas Sowell once told an interviewer, “Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature:”

There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.

One thing that worries me though. In earlier years, when Obama was attempting to sell is crony socialism under the guise that the planet is doomed, he always loved to take Air Force One up on Earth Day, if only to thumb his nose at the radical environmentalist true believers in his party:

Obama is spending a rare day actually in DC today, which means he’s not paying much attention to Earth Day himself this year.

Related: At Power Line, Steve Hayward notes that just in time for “Earth Day,” “the mainstream media are starting to get a few things:”

The Washington Post’s editorial page yesterday featured a house editorial entitled, “Europe is becoming a green energy basket case.”  This is pretty delicious:

FOR YEARS, European leaders have flaunted their unwavering commitment to fighting climate change — and chastised the United States for lagging behind. But last week brought yet more confirmation that the continent has become a green-energy basket case. Instead of a model for the world to emulate, Europe has become a model of what not to do.

So the ol’ “Eco-Anschluss,” as Conde-Nast described it isn’t working out? I’m shocked, shocked!

Hayward mentions former Time-Life journalst Elizabeth Nickson’s recent book Eco-Fascists in his post. Click here for my October interview with Elizabeth discussing her book.

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“Coming Soon: The Summer When You’re Expected to Save Drive-In Movie Theaters,” Time claimed last week:

Later this year, movie studios are scheduled to stop distributing films in old-fashioned 35-millimeter format. Everything will go digital, which is fine for the vast majority of indoor theaters that have already upgraded to digital projectors. It’s a different story with drive-ins, however, many of which find themselves in need of handouts to pay for the upgrade. Care to cough up a $100 donation on top of the cost of popcorn?

Yes, there are still drive-in theaters in existence, though it’s rare for a state to have more a handful left. For example, there are eight drive-in theaters in Michigan, according to MichiganDriveIns.com. MLive reported that at least one of the existing theaters, the Capri Drive-In, just paid $144,000 to upgrade two of its projectors to digital. It’s unlikely that all of the other drive-ins will be able to do the same. Drive-ins are hardly big money makers; more than 150 others in the state have closed over the years.

DriveInTheater.com has a state-by-state list of operational and dead drive-ins, and for every state, the deceased list is far longer. Once, more than 4,000 drive-ins dotted the nation. More than three-quarters of them closed by the late ’80s.

I certainly don’t mind seeing a few drive-in theaters saved from extinction. But I’m rather surprised to see that someone from Time magazine is waxing nostalgic for them, because drive-in theaters they represent everything that’s anathema to the magazine since founder Henry Luce left the building in 1967. They represent suburbia and the American hinterlands, which Time has loathed as The Other since as early 1969. They represent cars and the internal combustion engine — and we all know where Time stands on the issue of global warming:

And they represent suburban sprawl. Shouldn’t Time be arguing that those last drive-in theaters be leveled so that some massive high-density apartment blocks be built there to help reduce all that inefficient land use that’s so hated by today’s socialist architectural gurus?

But Time’s homage to the drive-in movie is yet more proof that increasingly, it’s now the left who are increasingly nostalgic for a halcyon American past. As we mentioned last year, witness statist Paul Krugman’s surprising homage to Eisenhower’s America or Woody Allen’s frequent encomiums to the 1930s. Or as libertarian blogger Radley Balko wrote in 2004:

You know, you sometimes get the feeling the day after the polio vaccine was invented, today’s left would have run editorials lamenting the good ol’ days, when we were a little more cautious about what swimming pools we jumped into, and expressing sadness that we’d now have no new stories about the afflicted overcoming their disability to inspire the rest of us.

I’m not kidding. They’re that resistant to change. Every mill that shuts down is a “sign of our sad times.” No matter that the new mill will do things better, faster and cheaper than the old one. New farming techniques grow more food on less land. But dammit, if there wasn’t something romantic about the old-stye “family farm” that’s deserving of government protection. Innovation isn’t celebrated, it’s excoriated for displacing some idealized vision of the way things once were. In matters of progress and dynamism, the left is far more conservative than the conservatives are.

Then there’s matter of the sustainability of Hollywood’s own product, at least in the minds of those who believe that the earth’s days are numbered, do to man’s rapacious anti-environmental nature. For example, when Avatar was released onto DVD in 2010, James Cameron told the Washington Post that “DVDs are wasteful:”

It’s a consumer product like any consumer product. I think ultimately we’re going to bypass a physical medium and go directly to a download model and then it’s just bits moving in the system. And then the only impact to the environment is the power it takes to run the computers, run the devices. I think that we’re not there yet, but we’re moving that direction. Twentieth Century Fox has made a commitment to be carbon neutral by the end of 2010. Because of some of these practices that can’t be changed, the only way to do that is to buy carbon offsets. You know, which again, these are interim solutions. But at least it shows that there’s a consciousness that we have to be dealing with carbon pollution and sustainability. …

And speaking of consumer products, why, wasn’t it just a couple of years ago that Fareed Zakaria, one of Time’s editors at large, and a would-be advisor to the president himself was telling CNN we needed to reduce consumption?

Parker asked Zakaria if he had faith the American people could handle the fiscal discipline he advocated. Zakaria used the platform as an opportunity to attack Americans and refute the notion “the American people are wonderful.” His solution: Less consumption by the American people.

“No, I think the people are the big problem,” Zakaria said. “I mean, Americans — everybody wants to say the American people are so wonderful. You know, I think that when they come to recognize that they have to make sacrifices too that it’s not just wasteful — they need to have — they need to recognize that some of what’s going to happen here is fewer. They have to consume fewer things. They have to accept slightly higher taxes. And in the long run, you will have a much better economy.”

If that’s what Cameron and the rest of Hollywood (which includes Warner Brothers, which is part of the same conglomerate as Time) truly believe about their own product, and an editor-at-large of Time itself thinks about the American public, shouldn’t they live up to those same rules as well?

Update: Unless of course, all of Time’s theories about the impending horrors of life in the 21st century were just so much fatuous leftwing politics made up on the spot to achieve a desired socialistic outcome, and deep down inside, they never believed any of that stuff in the first place.

If so, shouldn’t they let us know they’ve changed their mind?

Related: “America’s Largest Movie Theatre Chain Cuts Worker Hours, Citing ObamaCare,” Bryan Preston writes at the Tatler.

So from Fareed Zakaria’s perspective, it’s a two-fer.

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In 2011, Newt Gingrich came within a whisker of capturing the GOP presidential nomination largely through the good will he earned from Republican voters who were thrilled to finally see somebody not accept the premise of his media interrogators’ questions. Even after Mitt Romney won the nomination, Newt could confront media blowhards via his patented technique of simply not accepting the underlying bias, vitriol, and “Progressive” nihilism behind their questions, as Ed Morrissey wrote in August of last year:

Even those of us who couldn’t quite bring ourselves to back Newt Gingrich in the primaries hoped that he would play a big role in the general election as a surrogate. This video demonstrates why. Gingrich reacts to Piers Morgan’s suggestion that the “big flaw” in Ryan’s budget was that the rich would do well, and in two minutes teaches Economics 101, accuses Morgan of media bias, and rips the Obama economy as the “worst recovery in 75 years.” And that’s just Newt getting warmed up, as Newsbusters highlights:

PIERS MORGAN, HOST: I suppose the fundamental debate that’s going to be had, though, will come down to whether the Republicans can sell to the American people that they are really concerned about jobs, about people’s livelihoods, and all the rest of it. If they’re also scratching the backs of their rich and wealthy members, which is clearly I think the flaw in the Ryan plan is that it just does. I mean, if you’re very wealthy, you’re going to be doing a lot better out of Paul Ryan than you would out of Barack Obama who believes fundamentally the rich should pay more tax.

NEWT GINGRICH: You know, I don’t want to sound disrespectful, but I do wonder sometimes if you guys all get off in a little club and learn a brand new mantra and then all repeat it mindlessly. The fact is, these kinds of things were said about Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan’s tax cut – which was developed by Jack Kemp who Paul Ryan worked for – Ronald Reagan’s tax cut raised more people to middle class status, took more people out of poverty, created more jobs.

The “mantra club” is a great name for the MSM. And one of their most overused techniques in an effort to simulate their mantras having acceptance beyond their own editorial bullpens is through the use of a ubiquitous, albeit imaginary member of the American public named Mr. Somesay. Pay any amount of attention to television news, and you’ll quickly find Mr. Somesay everywhere. He’s local, nationwide and global. He’s omnipresent. Or as John Nolte noted last year at Big Journalism when a former CNN anchor tacitly invoked Mr. Somesay’s name:

No one, however, made me laugh harder than CNN’s Soledad O’Brien. Right now Soledad is presiding over a disastrous CNN morning show that probably draws fewer viewers than a midnight fistfight outside a Texas honkytonk, and here’s part of the reason why:

If Mitt Romney doesn’t come forward with a better plan, many economists we spoke to this morning would say, “You know, the President is not to blame and that anybody in the same position would have the same challenging numbers. It’s really going to be incumbent upon the Republicans to say ‘Well, here’s what we would do better and provide a convincing argument if they expect to take the White House’”.

That Soledad quote is actually from the show that follows her’s, but it’s the same absurd talking points I laughed out loud at during her own barely watchable show.

What Soledad is transparently doing there, besides proving why CNN’s ratings have completely collapsed, is engaging in the media art of “SomeSay.” And what that is is selectively choosing who to quote in order to make the point you want to make and to push a narrative you want to push.  SomeSay is simply a way around openly blurting out your own partisan opinion.

Elizabeth Scalia, at her Anchoress blog, once wrote that “Some say” was the most annoying media cliche of 2005:

My personal choice: “some say…” Used continually by Katie Couric, David Gregory and oh, basically anyone in the press who wanted to advance their own personal opinion or the general concensus of the fourth estate: “Some say President Bush is trying to undermine our civil liberties,” “Some say Iraq is a quagmire,” “Some say America is a world-bully,” “Some say if only the Kyoto treaty had been recognised…”

Just once, I would like to hear a politician come back with, “WHO says? WHO exactly SAYS, Katie, David, Tim, etc”

They’d never spill the true answer, though, “why, WE say, WE in the press!”

During a 1980 interview Thatcher did just that:

As spotted by Australia’s Tim Blair, who adds:

Be alert over coming days for tearful leftoids railing against Thatcher’s opposition to state-owned, union-dominated coal mines. Let’s see them complain about this bloke, who demands global shutdowns of coal mines – yet is supported by leftists.

Here in the States, this brings us to yet another example of Two CNNs in One. “CNN Says Thatcher ‘Decimated’ British Communities, Industries,” Newsbusters reports, in their efforts to round-up a thimble full of the bottomless bias on display in the American MSM in response to Lady Thatcher’s death:

Reporting on the late Margaret Thatcher’s legacy on Monday, CNN correspondent Max Foster hyped that she “decimated entire industries” in Britain and “decimated communities across the UK.” He also cited Gerry Adams, the public face of the IRA for decades, as a valid critic of Thatcher.

In addition to citing praise for Thatcher, Foster offered a blistering critique on Monday’s Starting Point: “This was the prime minister that decimated entire industries in the United Kingdom during her period in power as she broke the miners unions in a push towards privatization to create a more flexible British economy, which it has become. But she decimated communities across the UK. And a lot of people absolutely despise her legacy.”

As opposed to the president who promises to bankrupt them, to which the network bakes cakes and gives fistbumps in supplication:

And speaking of not accepting the premise, when the pressure cooker containing all of the blood boiling vitriol the British left have ginned up against Thatcher over the decades finally burst today, the London Telegraph wound up closing the comments sections on all of their stories regarding the prime minister’s death:

Tony Gallagher, The Daily Telegraph editor, tweeted Monday that the comment sections on all Thatcher-related stories had been closed.

“We have closed comments on every #Thatcher story today – even our address to email tributes is filled with abuse,” Gallagher tweeted.

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In the middle of a photo-laden essay on protesters greeting Obama on San Francisco’s Billionaires’ Row, filled with loads of shots of all of the Bay Area moonbattery you can imagine, Zombie stops to make a brilliant observation:

It all culminated in this one sign, which of all the signs at the protest disturbed me the most. Yes, Obama really did say “Show me the movement. Make me do it.” (At least according to Michael Pollan, who quoted Obama while speaking at an environmental event in 2009.) In fact, a more extended quote from that speech might explain the motivation behind this entire protest:

Now, this agenda that I’m talking about, your own agenda, is not gonna happen just because we have a President and a First Lady who are sympathetic. That’s not how change comes. Change is much, much harder than that. Presidents cannot flip the switch and make things happen…. A friend of mine had occasion to have dinner with him and Michelle, and Obama made it clear that he got it, that he really did understand the issue, but he also said he didn’t think the time was right to push hard. He understood the forces arrayed on the other side and the great amount of political capital it would take to defeat them. … He challenged my friend, he said, “Show me the movement. Make me do it. Make me do it.”

…Now, that language, that language, “Make me do it,” is very interesting. Presidents have uttered that word – those words before. Roosevelt used them when he was being lobbied about certain issues. There’s a very interesting scene when Martin Luther King came to Lyndon Johnson and said, “We need this Voting Rights Act. You know, we need your help,” and Johnson turned to him and said, “I wanna do it. Make me do it.” He wasn’t just gonna do it. He needed to be made. He was telling Martin Luther King to get out in the street and make it happen.

Another example, President Clinton in 1993, he had a very difficult budget negotiation in Congress. He lost a lot. He moved way to the right and gave up a lot of his campaign promises to get this 1993, his first budget. And, at the signing of this budget, Bernie Sanders, the member of his caucus furthest to his left was there, and he came over to Bernie Sanders and he started pounding on his chest like this and he said, “Why weren’t you screaming at me? I needed you to be screaming at me, because then I could have brought you something.” So, as kindly as you feel towards Michelle and Barack, keep those lessons in mind.

Vilsack said something similar to a group of activists he met with just last month, “I need your help. Build a movement.” And he understands. Because the farm lobby is already organizing against him. So, we need to get organized. We need to flex our muscles. …

Now is not the time to savor the moment or rest. Now is the time to make Obama do it. Let’s show him the movement.

This explains how people who voted for Obama can be out in the street seemingly to protest “against” him. Turns out this whole protest was nothing more play-acting for the cameras, a group of faux protesters colluding with Obama to create a Potemkin “movement” which he can then cite as justification for making an unpopular decision he already wanted to make anyway. “I had no choice — there’s a mass movement against this pipeline! I must bow to the will of the people.”

The more I thought about this sign and its implications, the more disturbed I became. This explains not just today’s anti-Keystone pipeline protest, but also much of what has gone on in politics since 2008. It explains the media’s otherwise inexplicable glorification and attempted legitimization of the Occupy Wall Street movement; it explains the media’s desperate demonization of the Tea Party (so as to prevent the impression that it was a mass movement); it explains all sorts of outrages and protests and petitions and marches by the American far-left “against” a president whose agenda is identical to theirs. Every time the left erupted over some issue, I used to wonder, “Why are you complaining to Obama? He agrees with you!” Turns out that of course they all know full well that he agrees with them, that he and they are all on the same side. The purpose is not to change Obama’s mind, the purpose is to provide him with political cover to make bad or unpopular decisions, by fabricating hollow “popular uprisings” which he can then point to as indicative of overall public opinion.

My speculations were confirmed the following day when I read the only report of what was said inside the fundraisers, as quoted by the only “pool reporter” allowed into the events:

Steyer, who is a vociferous opponent of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and a strong supporter of climate-change legislation, appeared to try to ease concerns that Obama wouldn’t keep the issue at the top of his agenda, as he has promised.

“He is doing everything he can on the issues that we care about,” Steyer told the group in his home. “He has political limitations…so we really have an obligation to help him.”

Obama for his part, addressed climate change repeatedly in his remarks, which lasted 19 minutes, but never specifically mentioned the pipeline.

So it was just as I suspected: The protesters and Obama and his billionaire backers are all enmeshed, working in conjunction to achieve specific political goals — goals that would otherwise be unpopular with the general public. I realized that we out on the street were not protesting against the president’s agenda: We were part of the president’s agenda.

It really is “Potemkin villages all the way down,” isn’t it? (When it’s not Kabuki, of course.)

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“Nice puff piece on San Francisco’s Trash Inspectors” in the Atlantic, one of Ace’s co-bloggers quips. “I can’t quite put my thumb on why California has a debt issue. It couldn’t be paying people to do stuff like this can it?” The piece highlights — I take it back, praises — nanny-state intrusiveness to the nth-degree:

To help improve the city’s landfill diversion rate, Slattery and his crew pound the pavement, both in the early morning and in the evening, keeping tabs on what’s being thrown out and educating people about the three-bin system. The early-morning cart monitors are armed with clipboards, and they take notes about the trash sorting behavior of each household, which is later entered into a database and given to the outreach crew.

“Bad, bad, bad,” says Calderon, shaking her head as she peered into the bins in front of a small home. “This goes in here,” she says, pointing to pieces of plastic packaging that had been put in the black bin instead of the blue recycling bin. She makes a note of it and moves to the next house. There’s no time to waste, because it’s garbage day, and the crew has to remain a few blocks ahead of the trash collectors.

In the course of the morning, we encountered a handful of people – mostly Chinese Americans – who looked somewhat surprised to find a group rummaging through their trash. Each time, Slattery points to his vest and explains that he’s with the Department of Environment. By about 7 a.m., the workers take off their reflective vests and headlamps and head back to the office to log the data they’ve gathered.

San Francisco residents are required by law to separate their compost and recycling from the rest of their trash, and soon they’ll have an added incentive to do so. Recology, the city’s trash hauler, will likely be raising its rates this summer. Under the proposed change, compost and recycling would no longer be free, but people who opt to downsize their black trash bin would pay a reduced fee.

Needless to say, this is all bulls***, to give it a name:

And it’s also a case of two Atlantics in one; elsewhere on the Website, Conor Friedersdorf (I know, I know) explores “What Progressives Can Learn From Their California Failures.” But won’t of course:

What vexes me most about California governance is the pervasive dysfunction. Whatever one thinks about taxation in the state, disagreements about how big government should be and what it should do are proper and unavoidable. But the flame-retardant-couch law? The inability to fire the worst teachers in a timely manner? The pernicious giveaways to the California prison guards? The public-employee pensions so unsustainable that they’ve already bankrupted cities? The gerrymandering? The inability to provide accurate cost estimates for high-speed rail? These problems aren’t rooted in different ideological visions or the minority party’s intransigence.

They’re just amateur hourish — seemingly undeniable evidence of inept governance. The state needs its own Washington Monthly just to chronicle all of the dysfunction. Says Krugman, “at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right.” Fair enough. The Democrats are running things now. Let’s see how quickly they fix the problems that I’ve mentioned, now that nothing matters save their own ability to govern, or lack thereof. I predict that the legislature will remain captive to teacher and prison-guard unions, that public-employee pensions will continue to eat up an unsustainable share of the state’s revenue, that the increased tax revenue will largely be steered to special-interest groups, and that Democrats will prove unable to complete large infrastructure projects on time or on budget. Let’s revisit in a year to see if my pessimism or Krugman’s optimism proves closer to the mark.

I sincerely hope I am proved wrong.

As long as its cities are featherbedding their payrolls by hiring people to go through their citizens’ garbage, it’s a safe bet he won’t be on this topic, at least.

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USA post-BHO, explored by VDH in NRO:

We can imagine what lies ahead in 2017 — no matter the result of either the 2014 midterm elections or the 2016 presidential contest.

There will be no more $1 trillion deficits. About $10 trillion will have been added to the national debt during the Obama administration, on top of the more than $4 trillion from the eight-year George W. Bush administration. That staggering sum will force the next president to be a deficit hawk, both fiscally and politically.

In addition, there will be no huge new federal spending programs — no third or fourth stimulus, no vast new entitlements. The debt is so large and voters are so tired of massive borrowing that the next president will talk not of “investments” but of balancing the budget. In 2017, President Hillary Clinton or President Marco Rubio will tell us that cutting spending and living within our means is the new cool.

If eight years of borrowing, printing, spending, and lending vast sums of money at zero interest did not lead to economic recovery, then the antithesis of all that will be the explicit platform of Republicans and the implicit one of Democrats.

Obamacare may remain in name, but in fact most of its provisions will be discarded or amended. Its full implementation next year will result in almost everything that was not supposed to happen: higher health-care premiums, rationed care, scarcer doctors, and fewer jobs. Obamacare will mostly go the way of the Defense of Marriage Act — officially the law of the land, but its enforcement simply ignored by the powers that be.

Read the whole thing, and then start getting the ice packs ready for America’s giant collective hangover.

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Play the tape machine, make the toast and tea, we’re goin’ mobile — with another potential subprime loan bubble: “The Obama administration is pushing banks to make car loans to people with poor credit ratings,” Jim Hoft writes at Gateway Pundit, linking to a Reuters piece that notes:

In its efforts to jumpstart the economy, the U.S. central bank has undertaken since November 2008 three rounds of bond-buying and cut short-term interest rates effectively to zero.The purchases of mostly Treasury and mortgage securities – known as quantitative easing and nicknamed QE1, QE2 and QE3 – have injected trillions of dollars into the financial system.

The Fed isn’t alone. Central banks from Tokyo to Frankfurt to London are running their printing presses overtime. The heavily indebted advanced economies are trying to reflate their way out of the prolonged bout of crisis and recession that crystallized with the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc in 2008. That crisis, of course, followed a nearly decade-long cycle of easy money and exotic financial products that itself began with the collapse of the tech-mania bubble of the late 1990s.

The Fed’s program, while aimed at bolstering the U.S. housing and labor markets, has also steered billions of dollars into riskier, more speculative corners of the economy. That’s because, with low interest rates pinching yields on their traditional investments, insurance companies, hedge funds and other institutional investors hunger for riskier, higher-yielding securities – bonds backed by subprime auto loans, for instance.

Lenders like Exeter have rushed to meet that demand. Backed by Wall Street banks and big private-equity firms, they have been selling ever-greater amounts of subprime auto loans in the form of relatively high-yield securities and using the proceeds to fund even more lending to more subprime borrowers.

As I asked yesterday about the return of subprime home loans, what could go wrong — again?

Also, isn’t this a case of two administrations in one, with the Obama administration simultaneously wanting higher gas prices, and concurrently, more new vehicles on the road? To flip over a joke once made by President Reagan when his own administration appeared at cross-purposes, in the Obama White House, sometimes the left hand doesn’t seem to know what the far left hand is doing.

(Via Maggie’s Farm, which has plenty more links worth reading this morning.)

Related: More thoughts on the subprime Obama economy from Ed Morrissey this morning in the Fiscal Times.

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As the late Michael Crichton observed in 2003, “I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form:”

You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of theenvironment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain*, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christis the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them.

These are not facts that can be argued.

These are issues of faith.

And that faith must not be questioned. Or as the Daily Caller reports, “Environmentalists to news networks: cover climate change more, skeptics less:”

Invoking news coverage of recent extreme weather events, environmentalists are urging the public to sign a petition to pressure major television networks to do more coverage of climate change.

The petition, by the League of Conservation Voters, is aimed at executive producers of nightly news programs for major broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC — who the groups say don’t focus enough news coverage on climate change issues and, when they do cover the issue, portray the issue as a “two-sided debate” by featuring climate skeptics.

“What’s almost worse is that when these networks have covered global warming, they have often treated climate change as a ‘two-sided debate’ rather than what it really is: an issue in which there is overwhelming scientific consensus,” writes Vanessa Kritzer, online campaigns manager for the League of Conservation Voters.

“By bringing on climate-denying politicians and pundits, and giving them as much ‘expert’ status as actual climate scientists, the networks perpetuate the false debate that polluter-funded think tanks have instigated to cast doubt on whether we should take action to address the climate crisis at all.”

In 2007, a headline at Editor & Publisher, a house organ for the print side of the MSM advised its readers, “Climate Change: Get Over Objectivity, Newspapers.”

Come to think of it,  perhaps the world’s shortest blog post would list what topics the MSM does cover objectively.

I’m drawing a blank — let me know in the comments if you can think of any.

Related: “The Economist Breaks with the Climate Orthodoxy,” Roger L. Simon notes. That won’t comfort the faithful very much.

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…Or at least it should be, since we all killed an hour on February 3rd staring into our TV sets at the New Orleans Superdome with the power out at the start of the third quarter of the Super Bowl.

But hey, remember tonight “to switch off the lights but keep all your CO2-emitting gadgets on so you can tweet how much you care about our planet.”

Not to mention think of it as a sneak preview of life going forward in Jerry Brown’s California.

Update: Found via Jon Gabriel of the Exurban League:

Also, I’m happy to help Firefox permanently reduce its carbon footprint, by stopping use of its browser.

Related: At the Corner, Stanley Kurtz asks”Are Democrats Tearing Themselves Apart” over energy? Read the whole thing.

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We’ll get to the image above in a just a moment. It was created to help promote the visionary space station proposals of scientist Gerard O’Neill in the mid-1970s, a glimpse of a hopeful, albeit technocratic future in the midst of an otherwise painfully long slog of a decade.

But first, let’s set the stage. In 1975, Pat Moynihan wrote, “Most liberals had ended the 1960s rather ashamed of the beliefs they had held at the beginning of the decade.” Their collective emotional depression — a malaise you might call it — was greatly exacerbated by the disparity between their dreams at the beginning of the 1960s, and the very different reality that emerged as they began to attempt to implement them.

As James Piereson noted at the beginning of “Lee Harvey Oswald and the Liberal Crack-Up,” the magnum opus 2006 Commentary article that served as the prototype for his book the following year, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution:

Liberalism entered the 1960′s as the vital force in American politics, riding a wave of accomplishment running from the Progressive era through the New Deal and beyond. A handsome young president, John F. Kennedy, had just been elected on the promise to extend the unfinished agenda of reform. Liberalism owned the future, as Orwell might have said. Yet by the end of the decade, liberal doctrine was in disarray, with some of its central assumptions broken by the experience of the immediately preceding years. It has yet to recover.

Along with the cognitive dissonance of the horrific death of JFK via a Marxist assassin, by 1968, liberalism was chastened by LBJ’s overreach. By 1966, he was attempting to simultaneously escalate JFK’s war in Vietnam and Kennedy’s small-scale anti-poverty programs to Texas-sized proportions. He also kept JFK’s vision of landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade on track. As Rand Simberg noted, LBJ was far from altruistic on this matter – he saw the space program as a sort of giant TVA project which would help modernize the south, and distribute plenty of money into his constituents’ coffers.

But even before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, liberals of the era had begun to turn their back on Kennedy’s vision of the bold New Frontier – including JFK’s surviving brothers. Robert Kennedy’s 1968 campaign ads and campaign speeches had a very different tone that tacitly rebuked his brother’s optimism. The following year, Teddy Kennedy was more explicit. He was quoted in the New York Times on the day after Armstrong and Apollo 11 took off for the Moon, as saying, “The Apollo program is for landing a man on the moon and exploration and should take another one to two years. I think after that the space program ought to fit into our other national priorities.”

And that it would, quickly scaling back in the early 1970s. The moon missions concluded; followed by Skylab, which was perhaps best known for its disastrous launch in 1973 and its ignominious crash to earth six years later, rather than its actual manned missions, and the Apollo-Soyuz link-up, and then nothing. The Apollo technology was discarded, as NASA put all of its resources for manned spaceflight into the Space Shuttle, which Arthur C. Clarke would later write off as not even the DC-3 of space, but the “DC 1 and a half,” if I’m remembering correctly the phrase he used in an interview after the Challenger disaster.

Back on planet earth, by the beginning of the 1970s, what the Carter administration would describe at the end of the decade as a “malaise” that the 39th president and his fellow liberals suffered from was encapsulated in the 1972 book Limits to Growth, as Steve Hayward wrote in the first volume of The Age of Reagan:

["Limits to growth" was partly] an influence of the rapidly growing environmental movement, which, in its early days, was much taken with the 1972 Club of Rome book The Limits to Growth. The book offered a gloomy argument that natural resource depletion and rising pollution threatened mankind’s long-term future unless economic growth was slowed or stopped. The Limits to Growth had the benefit of fortuitously appearing at the same time that commodity shortages were becoming chronic. Newsweek magazine in 1973 ran a cover picture of an empty horn of plenty with the ominous headline RUNNING OUT OF EVERYTHING? Most of the commodity shortages of the early 1970s were the result of the Nixon price controls discussed in chapter 6, and by 1976 the Club of Rome repudiated its own argument, recognizing that conquering poverty and preserving world peace would require a lot of economic growth.

The idea of the limits to growth has remained a core concept of environmentalism nonetheless, and became the new visage of liberal guilt. For some varieties of the liberal mind, gloom is exhilarating, and the limits to growth offered a large-scale sequel to the Vietnam War. Carter embraced the limits to growth view in his inaugural address, noting that “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ that even our great Nation has its recognized limits.” Margaret Thatcher, among many others, noted the trouble with this, writing that Carter “had no large vision of America’s future so in the face of adversity, he was reduced to preaching the austere limits to growth that was unpalatable, even alien, to the American imagination.” Liberalism is historically an optimistic creed, and having open doubts about growth was a disaster for liberalism. In the space of a decade, the central governing challenge of liberalism had transformed from allocating abundance to rationing scarcity. National Review took note of this problem as the Carter administration unfolded: “The profound negativism of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party is alien to the American tradition. The Democratic coalition could be split like a coconut on these issues. The Republicans, if they presented themselves as the party of growth, optimism, and expanding possibility could surely seize the high ground from the presently deeply divided and artificial Democratic coalition.”

All in all, this was an awfully grim time for those who remembered the futuristic optimism of the early to mid-1960s. Until about 1977, when Star Wars, the first personal computers and the first video games reawakened a sliver of American technological optimism, other than Star Trek and reruns of Gerry Anderson’s sleek 1970 British series UFO, there weren’t many bright spots for those of us “who want to see doors slide open with a little ‘woosh’ sound,” as James Lileks once wrote on the 30th anniversary of the original Star Wars.

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In 2006, with the help of enormous amount of the Photoshop clone tool, a Middle Eastern stringer for Reuters named Adnan Hajj famously made Beirut look like this:

No Photoshop (to the best of our knowledge) this time around, merely an enormous lack of context:

“Do you want to know what propaganda looks like? Take glance at this article from the Washington Post,” found on Anthony Watts’ Watts Up With That blog:

And what do you suppose those black, deadly-looking plumes of “emissions” really are?

Condensing steam, that’s what. Just plain water.

Plumes of condensing water vapor normally look white and benign, but by artfully choosing a vantage point to the east of the plant, and a time just after sunset, AP photographer Charlie Riedel managed to make the pretty white plumes look black and threatening.

That power plant has state-of-the-art “scrubbers,” which which cost over $400 million, and which remove 95% of the SO2 and nearly all of the particulate matter. Almost nothing visible is left except steam. Here’s what those same stacks really look like, under normal lighting conditions:

Click over the photo and read the whole post, which was found via Kate at Small Dead Animals, who observed Canada’s CBC attempting a similar bit of propaganda back in 2007.

What ties a disgraced Middle Eastern Reuters stringer and the Post’s radical environmentalism together? When you believe you’re fighting a Holy War against the Infidels, all’s fair. Or as the late Michael Crichton once observed:

I think that you cannot eliminate religion from the psyche of mankind. If you suppress it in one form, it merely re-emerges in another form. You can not believe in God, but you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.

Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists. Why do I say it’s a religion? Well, just look at the beliefs. If you look carefully, you see that environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths.

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of theenvironment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain*, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christis the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them.

These are not facts that can be argued.

These are issues of faith.

Incidentally, HG Wells gave this religion a name in the early 1930s.

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