Democrat Barack Obama Friday said his "panicked" White House rival John McCain was flailing at a time of financial crisis and said a government rescue for Wall Street must shield regular Americans too.

Mayordaley II exhibited similar innocence of economic awareness:

Daley said yesterday (Wednesday) the [bailout] money would be better spent on education.

Daley said he feels sorry for the people of the United States. He said the nation doesn't have enough money for education, but it has enough money to . . . fix every problem on Wall Street.

As if the whole economic shootin’ match has nothing to do with his payouts to schools. 

Meanwhile, he’s ready to make it harder to do business in Chicago, having bought into Kyoto, etc.:

Next month, the City Council is expected to consider an ordinance that would update the city's energy code to require such things as better insulation, heating and cooling systems and windows in all commercial, industrial and residential buildings.

The city also has an agreement with two coal-fired power plants to reduce emissions or shut down by 2015 and 2017, respectively, [ Suzanne] Malec-McKenna [Chicago's environmental commissioner] said.

Onward and upward, Richard M.  Intervene, intervene, intervene.

In his 973 words — roughly 2/3 the size of a major-takeout “Insight” feature at the old Chicago Daily News — he has not a word of any controversy in the question whether what we do will change global cycles of warming and cooling.

Not a hint.

And to think that one quote could have perked up somnolent Trib readers, who have refused to support retention of various editors and reporters, namely this:

[W]ater in the form of oceans, snow, ice cover, clouds and vapor “is overwhelming in the radiative and energy balance between the Earth and the sun. ... Carbon dioxide and the greenhouse gases are, by comparison, the equivalent of a few farts in a hurricane.”

That’s from one Martin Hertzberg, a retired combustion research scientist who as a Navy meteorologist acquired “a lifelong mistrust of climate modeling” — the bread and butter of climate worriers.

He is quoted in a Heartland Institute paper engagingly titled, “Is Global Warming a Sin?”

Even in pre-telephone and -digital messaging age, the institute, conveniently located at 19 S. LaSalle, would have been accessible to Dechant, were he and his editors — including the bought-out Gratteau? — willing to entertain any but popular certainties about science.

After 25 years of official scaremongering about western societies being ravaged by the disease – with salacious, tombstone-illustrated [UK] government propaganda warning people to wear a condom or "die of ignorance" – the head of the World Health Organisation's HIV/Aids department says there is no need for heterosexuals to fret.

It’s “a high-level admission that there is no threat of a global Aids pandemic among heterosexuals.”

Instead of being treated as a sexually transmitted disease that affected certain high-risk communities, and which should be vociferously tackled by the medical authorities, the "war against Aids" was turned into moral crusade.

Without foundation, and that was known as early as 1987, when there was

"no good evidence that Aids is likely to spread rapidly in the West among heterosexuals." In Britain, most of the small-scale spread of "heterosexual Aids" has been a result of infected individuals arriving from Africa. In the UK in the whole of the 1980s – the decade of the Great Aids Panic – there were 20 cases of HIV acquired through heterosexual contact with an individual infected in Europe.

For that matter, on this blogger’s book shelf is a 1990 book, The Myth of Heterosexual AIDS, by Michael Fumento, which argued, a Washington Monthly reviewer said, that:

the vast majority of Americans are more likely to meet Shirley MacLaine in a different life than to contract the deadly HIV-virus, and that the only reason the news hasn't gotten out is that a conspiracy of self-interested scientists, opportunitistic politicians, sensationalist journalists, conservative moralizers, and fearful homosexuals have manufactured the scare.

They apparently sought to incite the madness of crowds, as current a problem as when witches were hunted a long time ago.  Man-made, preventable global warming, anyone? 

But he may have another motivation for avoiding Mr. Klaus [writes Fund]. As the late William F. Buckley once put it, "Why does bologna reject the grinder?"

Klaus yesterday likened cap-and-traders (limiters by fiat of carbon emissions) to promoting a program such as Soviets imposed on his country.

Yes.  Central planners are all alike — like smokers at their pettin’ parties and poker games.  They just gotta have another way to run things.

Later: Here’s another approach:

Conservative grassroots group Grassfire.org wants people to waste as much energy as possible on June 12 by "hosting a barbecue, going for a drive, watching television, leaving a few lights on, or even smoking a few cigars."

The point: the group wants to "help Americans break free from the 'carbon footprint guilt' being imposed by Climate Alarmists."

Yes, a sort of kill-the-guilt program.

"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."

This is world-class meteorologist Dr. Wm. Gray in a speech at U. of N. Carolina.  Global warming, he said, is not man-made.  Grants are the thing for too many, he is saying.

Byrne cited the Clean Water Act allowing exception to the no-more-discharging part, “to accommodate important economic or social development,” which is a key argument.  How important is oil anyway?

Durbin also got carried away in saying Greenland will melt 2 to 5 degrees by 2100 and raise sea level 6.5 to 13 feet, citing a UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projection.  However, says warming skeptic (I should say debunker) Patrick J. Michaels,

The IPCC makes no such forecast . . .  [I]t projects that the melting of Greenland will cause a rise in sea levels of between half an inch and 4.5 inches by 2100.

Even in an Al Gore scenario, sea level would rise 8 inches.

Maybe Durbin has always had trouble with that inch-foot difference, from back in grade school.  In that case, should he be allowed to drive?

The public is calling for "greener" options in every industry. But when it comes to agricultural CO2 emissions, the "greener" option may not be what people think.