Fails to notice late May snow and ice storms while in Germany.  Posted from Newsbusters:   This is really getting hysterical. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) tours Europe to discuss the imminent doom to the planet at the hands of the left’s recent bogeyman anthropogenic global warming, late-May snows are falling all around her.

Honestly, folks, you can’t make this stuff up.

As she set out on her journey, such late-season white stuff hit parts of America, Canada, and Great Britain as reported by NewsBusters Tuesday.

Even better, as she met with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a late-season snowstorm rocked Germany, Switzerland, Austria, France, and Italy.

As reported by England’s Daily Mail (hilarious emphasis added throughout):

Freak snow, freezing temperatures and tropical storms across Europe are making the Bank Holiday washout here look almost pleasant.

In Spitzing in Germany, locals have been forced to wrap up after ten centimetres of snow brought out the snowploughs for the first time this year.

It was the same story in towns close to the Alps in Austria, Switzerland and even northern Italy where temperatures in May routinely climb into the 80s.

In one Swiss valley, 3,000 were trapped in hotels and guest houses because trains could not reach them in the snow.

Of course, all this was happening just after Speaker Pelosi claimed to have seen “firsthand evidence that climate change is a reality" in Greenland.

I guess she had her eyes closed to all the snow falling around her.

Would one call this ignorance, blindness, or some unfortunate mixture thereof?

Regardless of the answer, right-thinking people all over the world are hoping that snow falls wherever the Speaker travels on this trip.

Illustrated:

by Victor Davis Hanson

What do leftist, mostly secular elites share with medieval sinners?

They feel bad that the way they live sometimes doesn't quite match their professed dogma.

Many in the medieval church were criticized by internal reformers and the public at large for their controversial granting of penance, especially to the wealthy and influential. Clergy increasingly offered absolution of sins by ordering the guilty to confess. Better yet, sometimes the well-heeled sinners were told to pay money to the church, or to do good works that could then be banked to offset their bad.

Of course, critics of the practice argued that serial confessions simply encouraged serial sinning. The calculating sinner would do good things in one place to offset his premeditated bad in another. The corruption surrounding these cynical penances and indulgences helped anger Martin Luther and cause the Reformation.

Maybe it was inevitable that the old practice of paid absolution would appeal to elite baby boomers — a class and generation that always seems to want it both ways by compartmentalizing their lives. The only difference is that the new sinners are not so worried about God's wrath as they are about their reputation among their judgmental liberal gods.

Take the idea of "carbon offsets" made popular by Al Gore. If well-meaning environmentalist activists and celebrities either cannot or will not give up their private jets or huge energy-hungry houses, they can still find a way to excuse their illiberal consumption.

Instead of the local parish priest, green companies exist to take confession and tabulate environmental sins. Then they offer the offenders a way out of feeling bad while continuing their conspicuous consumption.

You can give money to an exchange service that does environmental good in equal measure to your bad. Or, in do-it-yourself fashion, you can calibrate how much energy you hog — and then do penance by planting trees or setting up a wind generator.

Either way, your own high life stays uninterrupted.

Some prominent green activists pay their environmental penance in cash, barter or symbolism to keep the good life. Al Gore, for example, still gets to use 20 times more electricity in his Tennessee mansion than the average household.

Take also the case of Laurie David, the green activist and wife of "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David. She has recently generated plenty of publicity for her biofuel-powered bus tour to promote environmentalism. But in other circumstances, David still flies on gas-guzzling private jets.

The best thing about this medieval idea of penance is that it can now be repackaged as politically correct "offsets." During the last few decades, the return of these modern indulgences has caught on in a variety of ways.

Liberal presidential candidate John Edwards, for example, lives in a 30,000-square-foot home, gets $400 haircuts and recently made a lot of cash by working for a profit-driven, cutthroat hedge fund. How's he supposed to alleviate his guilt over this? Presto! He can lecture others about the inequity of an American system that unfairly created two unequal societies — his rich nation and many others' poor one.

Don Imus was serially warned that his foul and sometimes racist banter would eventually get him into big trouble. Still, as he kept up his trash talking aimed at Jews, women and blacks, Imus also generously donated to, and even set up charities for, wounded veterans and poor children.

Thus, when his slurs inevitably crossed the line one too many times, Imus not only confessed and apologized, but, inevitably, claimed his indulgences of past good deeds in hopes of offsetting the present bad ones.

These varieties of contemporary offsets could be expanded. But you get the picture of the moral ambiguity. Penance, ancient and modern, was thought corrupt because it was not sincere apology nor genuine in its promise to stop the sin.

Thanks to carbon offsets, Al Gore keeps his mansion — and still feels good while warning others we all can't live as he does.

John Edwards chooses to offset his own privileges by sermonizing about unfairness in America.

And who can forget George Soros? The billionaire can lavishly fund liberal causes such as left-wing think tanks, Web sites and ballot initiatives — and thereby offset his millions made speculating on exchange rates and bankrupting small depositors. He's become a hero to those who ordinarily demonize such financial piracy.

In other words, "offsets" is merely a euphemism for words like cynicism and hypocrisy. So by all means help save the planet, worry about the poor, establish charities. Just spare us the medieval idea that such penance ever excuses your own excess.

A question more of us should be asking our politicians and the pundits when they talk of forcing 'climate change initiatives' on us.  Posted from Newsbusters: 

Better stow all potables, combustibles, and sharp objects, sports fans, because climatologist/environmental consultant Dr. Tim Ball and mechanical engineer Tom Harris wrote an op-ed for the Toronto Sun Monday that is destined to evoke untimely bouts of laughter.

Titled “Prove It! Environmental Do-gooders,” the piece marvelously took aim at governments deciding to prevent the use of consumer products – in the name of saving the planet – without any proof that their recommendations actually will benefit anyone (emphasis added throughout, grateful h/t Rush Limbaugh):

Take the recently announced ban on incandescent light bulbs. The federal government's "Action on Climate Change and Air Pollution" boasts the ban "will give Canadian consumers real opportunity both to save money on energy and to help clean up our environment." Prove it!

Delicious, don’t agree? They continued:

Show us the results of comprehensive life cycle analyses that demonstrate the energy savings accrued when operating a compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) more than compensates for the increased manufacturing and mercury disposal impacts associated with CFLs. Prove to us that the loss of convenience and light quality of the incandescent is off-set by a significant net environmental benefit. Or many Canadians will conclude the move was purely political, designed to look good in the press and trump the NDP who had a private members' bill banning incandescents in the works.

They concluded:

Looking "green" is no longer good enough -- governments must demonstrate their decisions really are green if they expect to be seen as anything other than political opportunists.

With this in mind, shouldn’t soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore and his band of not so merry sycophants such as Laurie David, Sheryl Crow, and Leonardo DiCaprio be required to prove their positions on anthropogenic global warming?

Or, is it enough for folks that have had absolutely no formal training in climatology, meteorology, or any earth science to just claim “The debate’s over?”

Illustrated:

Scary stuff.  One wonders how much of this is ongoing?  More than we realize probably.

Download the inspector general report (PDF)  Full story here.
  
     
    A newly released inspector general report backs eyewitness accounts of suspicious behavior by 13 Middle Eastern men on a Northwest Airlines flight in 2004 and reveals several missteps by government officials, including failure to file an incident report until a month after the matter became public.
    According to the Homeland Security report, the "suspicious passengers," 12 Syrians and their Lebanese-born promoter, were traveling on Flight 327 from Detroit to Los Angeles on expired visas. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services extended the visas one week after the June 29, 2004, incident.
    The report also says that a background check in the FBI's National Crime Information Center database, which was performed June 18 as part of a visa-extension application, produced "positive hits" for past criminal records or suspicious behavior for eight of the 12 Syrians, who were traveling in the U.S. as a musical group.
    In addition, the band's promoter was listed in a separate FBI database on case investigations for acting suspiciously aboard a flight months earlier. He was detained a third time in September on a return trip to the U.S. from Istanbul, the details of which were redacted.
    The inspector general criticized the Homeland Security officials for not reporting the incident to the Homeland Security Operations Center (HSOC), which serves as the nation's nerve center for information sharing and domestic incident management.
    The report comes three years after the incident, which was not officially acknowledged until a month later, after The Washington Times reported passenger and marshal complaints that the incident resembled a dry run for a terrorist attack. After reviewing the report, air marshals say it confirms their earlier suspicions.
    
    Official denial
    An air marshal who told The Times that he has been involved personally in terror probes that were ignored by federal security managers, called such behavior typical.

Video.  H/T: Atlas Shrugs:
 

Robert examines the recent Pew poll that revealed substantial support for suicide bombings among Muslims in the US.  Video from Robert spencer.

The continuing saga of muslims and their jihad, amongst other things... (funny stuff)
 

And irony of ironies, it may be none other than St. John of Tucson who empowered them to do so.

The trump card conservatives may hold is a constitutional rule that revenue-related bills must originate in the House. The Senate immigration measure requires that illegal immigrants pay back taxes before becoming citizens, opening the door to a House protest, dubbed a “blue slip” for the color of its paper.

House Republicans used the same back-taxes mandate for a blue-slip threat that derailed last year’s immigration conference. The new Senate bill still must survive two more weeks of voter scrutiny and contentious amendments, but several conservatives already are lying in wait for the Senate to “make the same mistake twice,” as one House GOP aide put it.

“If we get an opportunity to do it, believe me, we’ll do it,” the aide said. “I think it’s going to be a matter of who will get there first. A number of people in the House are dying to be fingered as the person who killed [the Senate bill].”…

The back-taxes provision that could trigger the blue slip came from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who continues to take heavy fire on the presidential hustings for supporting the immigration deal. McCain introduced a back-taxes amendment after a conference call in which Republican bloggers mentioned reports that the Bush administration had asked that this year’s bill not force the very costly process of tax collection among illegal immigrants.

Remember the kerfuffle last week when news broke that Chertoff, not the Democrats, insisted on pulling the back-taxes obligation from the bill? I guess St. John figured putting it back in would help soothe the savage base as it hisses at the mention of his very name. (Pssst — it won’t.) Didn’t he realize he was handing the House a blue slip by doing that? And did Bush and Chertoff realize that they were taking the blue slip away by pulling the provision? The reason they gave for stripping it from the bill was because it would have been too hard to calculate back taxes for illegals. That wasn’t a credible excuse to begin with. It’s less credible now.

It takes a majority vote of the House to actually use the blue slip for nuking purposes so we’ll need help, appropriately enough, from the Blue Dogs to pull it off. Exit question one: Given that it was right-wing bloggers who cornered McCain about the back-taxes provision, how much thanks do we owe them? Exit question two: If the blue slip is duly served, won’t the Senate just strip the back-taxes provision and send it back?

Update: Well, whoopee-dee-do! (H/T: Hot Air)

If I see a guy with flowing hair, wearing jeans, a denim jacket and cowboy boots - he's a dead man!

(Anybody get the reference?)  CDC isolates airline passenger with super TB:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States has isolated a man who may have exposed fellow passengers on two transatlantic flights to a strain of tuberculosis that is extremely hard to treat, officials said on Tuesday.

It was the first time the federal government has issued such an isolation order since at least 1963, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

CDC Director Dr. Julie Gerberding said authorities were trying to notify passengers who traveled aboard Air France 385 from Atlanta to Paris on May 13 and back to the United States from Prague on Czech Air Flight 0104 on May 24.

"This is an unusual TB organism, one that's very, very difficult to treat. And we want to make sure that we have done everything we possibly can to identify people who could be at risk," Gerberding said at a news conference.

Authorities did not identify the man, but said he voluntarily entered a medical isolation facility in New York City.

"The passengers most likely to be at risk would be the passengers would were seated in seats immediately close to the patient," Gerberding said.

"And consistent with the World Health Organization guidelines, CDC is recommending that those passengers be notified by their health officials in their responsible country or state, and that such persons then have a test for tuberculosis to determine whether or not they were in fact

Complete story here.

Illustrated:

Actual headline:  Canadian parents believe teaching their kids to swim is the best way to prevent drowning.  

The government says that swimming lessons alone are not enough.  Read below:  (full story here)

Safe Kids Canada says swimming lessons are not enough

Five Layers of Protection for Drowning Prevention

    1. Actively Supervise

    Active adult supervision should be the number one priority for parents.
Drowning occurs most commonly in swimming pools, often during a lapse of adult
supervision; 42 per cent of all children ages five to 14 who drowned in the
past ten years did not have an adult watching them at the time.(2)
    According to Safe Kids Canada's recent survey, one-third of parents say
that their child is safe to be around water without parental supervision by
the age of 12 if they have had swimming lessons. But research shows older
children are still at risk of drowning, as they may overestimate their skills,
physical strength or the depth of the water.
    What's more, 34 per cent of Canadian parents believe that if a child were
drowning nearby, they would hear splashing, crying and screaming. This is
simply not true. Drowning happens quickly and silently, often the child just
slips under the water. Their lungs fill with water, making it impossible to
make any sound.
    Bottom line: Parents and caregivers need to stay within sight and reach,
when children are in, on or around water.

    2. Get Trained

    While active adult supervision is the top priority when it comes to water
safety, it can't end there. Parents must be trained and prepared to deal with
an emergency. This means knowing how to call for help, swim and perform First
Aid and CPR.
    In the minutes it takes for emergency personnel to arrive, these skills
are critical in saving a child's life and preventing long-term injury.
    Bottom line: Adults need proper training before supervising children in,
on or around water.

    3. Create Barriers

    Nearly one in five Canadian parents (19 per cent) believe that if their
child has taken swimming lessons, fences and gates around home pools are not
needed. Studies have shown that using a four-foot high (1.2 m), four-sided
pool fence with a self-closing, self-latching gate could prevent 7 out of 10
drownings in children under the age of five.(3)
    While many Canadian pools have three-sided perimeter fencing, four-sided
fencing means the pool is completely fenced off from the house. Since
three-sided fencing uses the house as the fourth side to enclose a pool, it
enables children to easily access the pool from the house. A four-sided fence
provides a proven layer of protection.
    Safe Kids Canada is urging Canadians to change municipal by-laws
requiring a four-foot high (1.2 m), four-sided fence with a self-closing,
self-latching gate around all in-ground, above-ground and inflatable home
swimming pools.(4)
    Bottom line: A four-foot high (1.2 m), four-sided pool fence with a
self-closing, self-latching gate saves young lives.

    4. Use Lifejackets

    Lifejackets are designed to keep you afloat in water, but they only work
if you wear them. Nearly one-tenth of parents believe that children can be
left alone while swimming if they are wearing a floatation device such as a
lifejacket, arm floats or an inner tube. Only lifejackets and Personal
Floatation Devices (PFDs) are designed for safety but a child should not be
left alone to swim when wearing them. Arm floats, inner tubes and other
inflatable toys should never be used to prevent your child from drowning.
    Bottom line: Stay within sight and reach of your child and put young
children and weak swimmers in lifejackets when in, on or around water.

    5. Teach Kids To Swim

    Evidence shows that swimming ability alone cannot prevent downing. While
parent and tot swimming classes are designed to educate adults in water
safety, toddlers are still too young to grasp these concepts. Safe Kids Canada
recommends that by age five, children are ready to be enrolled in swimming
lessons. This is a developmental milestone for children. At this age children
have the mental capacity to understand the concepts taught in swimming
lessons, as well as the increased muscle development and coordination.
    Bottom line: Don't rely on swimming lessons alone to keep your kids safe.   

So much for that whole '72 virgins' thing.  Gotta love Mark Steyn:

News, news everywhere -- so much one can hardly take it all in:

Item One: In Gaza, Islamic Jihad is planning to send waves of female suicide bombers into action against the Zionist Entity. Asked by an Israeli reporter whether self-detonating ladies enjoy the same 72-virgin deal as the lads, an Arab scholar said no, but that the gals will be served in Paradise by "dwarfs." Snow White got seven dwarfs, but it's unclear whether Blow White will get the full 72: Sleepy, Grumpy, Bashful, etc., all the way down to Incendiary, Non-Alcoholic and Anti-Zionist.

Item Two: From Sikeston, Mo., comes the touching story of a 3-year-old girl and Raymon and Richard Miller, two brothers who happen to be the father and uncle thereof. Unfortunately, they don't know which is which. Four years ago, Holly Marie Adams, who was in town for the rodeo, "slept with" both men on the same day. And in the fullness of time, upon discovering the fullness of her belly, she decided Raymon was the dad and demanded child support.

Raymon decided he saw himself as more of the uncle type, and so dragged his brother into court. What did the DNA results show? Well, they're identical twins, so there's a 99.5 percent probability Raymon's the father and there's a 99.5 percent probability Richard's the father. And, as they're both crying uncle, that suits neither of them. Naturally, Raymon wants the state of Missouri to pick up the child support. Technically, the state of Missouri didn't "sleep with" Holly Marie Adams, though, if it too had been in town for the rodeo that day, its chances would have been better than even.

Given that neither man wants to be the father in any meaningful sense, the famous split decision of the wisdom of Solomon might be in both their interests, if not the little girl's. What passes for heartwarming family sentiment in this case comes from the brothers' mother, who said, "I felt like I had gained a granddaughter but lost my sons."

Item Three: America's bipartisan "comprehensive immigration reform" bill. Just because this story comes above the fold on Page One doesn't mean it's not just as nutty as the foot of page 27 news-in-brief stuff up above. Peggy Noonan's take at the Wall Street Journal bore the sub-headline: "Open Borders? Mass Deportations? How About Some Common Sense Instead?"

Indeed. Everyone wants to sound reasonable and be the chap who charts the middle course between the Scylla of open borders and the Charybdis of mass deportation. But these are not equivalent dangers. The Charybdis of mass deportation is a mythical monster: It does not exist. It will never exist. No politician is arguing for it, and no U.S. agency is capable of accomplishing it. Indeed, even non-mass deportation does not exist. Go on, try it. Go to your local immigration office and say: Hello, boys. Here I am. I'm an illegal immigrant, got no right to be here, been breaking the law for 20 years, but I've seen the light and I want you to deport me back to Mexico, Yemen, you name it. The immigration guys will say: Leave your name and address and we'll get back to you in a decade or three.

But the Scylla of open borders does exist. It's the reality of the situation. What else would you call it when a population the size of Belgium's (the lowball estimate) or Australia's (the upper end) moves onto your land? And with the connivance of multiple state agencies, not to mention those municipalities that proudly declare themselves to be "sanctuary cities?"

In life's rich tapestry, there are bound to be questions to which there are no good answers -- that Missouri paternity suit is one of them. That's how advocates of the "bipartisan compromise" prefer to talk about immigration: difficult business, no ideal solution, and only extremists would pursue such theoretical perfection as "mass deportation."

OK. But whatever happened to non-mass deportation? Not long after Sept. 11 I chanced to be heading north on I-87 between Plattsburgh and Montreal. At the border crossing from Champlain, N.Y., to Lacolle, Quebec, I noticed that what appeared to be a mini-refugee camp had sprung up. It's not often that you see teeming hordes lining up to get into Canada, so I asked the immigration officer what was going on. He rolled his eyes and did a bit of boy-those-crazy-Yanks stuff and then explained that most of the guys waiting to get in were from Pakistan. In the wake of 9/11, the authorities had rounded up various persons of interest in the New York City area. Whether or not they were terrorists, they'd certainly violated immigration law, overstaying visas and so forth. And as a result, many other illegal immigrants from Muslim countries had concluded it was time to liquidate their assets and break for the border. In other words, the roundup of a relatively small number of persons sent thousands more fleeing to Canada. As that Missouri grandma would say, don't look on it as losing a Pakistani illegal but as gaining a Canadian neighbor.

So the question is: Why is enforcement of U.S. immigration somewhere between minimal and nonexistent? By some estimates, half of all illegals have arrived on George W. Bush's watch -- i.e., they broke into a nation at war with borders supposedly on permanent "orange" alert.

To return to the 72-virgin jackpot, even the looniest jihad-inciting imam understands that human nature responds to incentive, to the tradeoff between obligation and reward. But the immigration bill is all reward and no obligations. The only clause that matters is the first one: the mandatory open-ended probationary legal status the bill will confer the moment it's passed. All the rest -- the enforcement provisions on border agents and security fences that will supposedly "trigger" Z-visas and then green cards -- is nonsense, most of which will never happen. If you're "undocumented," you don't care about whether your Z-visa leads to citizenship 15 years from now: What counts is crossing the line from illegal to legal, which in this bill happens first, happens instantly and happens (to all intents and purposes) irreversibly. All the rest is Beltway kabuki.

That Missouri case should remind us that in a wealthy society the knottiest problems are usually the consequences of moral choices. To embed lawbreaking at the heart of American immigration and to allow it to metastasize through the wider society was perverse and debilitating. Most Americans see this differently from Washington and Wall Street. They're pro-immigration but they don't regard it as a mere technicality, a piece of government paper: after all, feeling American is central to their own identity. They rightly revile the cheap contempt the rushed Senate bill demonstrates not just for transparent, honest small-r republican government but for the privilege of being American. Happy Memorial Day.