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So let’s just cut through that crap and remind ourselves briefly what we know about the plaintiff. Michael Mann was an obscure young physicist-turned-climatologist who rose without trace in 1998 with the publication in Nature of his ‘hockey stick’ chart showing dramatic and apparently unprecedented late-20th-century global warming. There followed almost instant fame, on which Mann has traded ever since — gaining tenure at Penn State University, drawing millions in public funding for research, often called on by the Guardian and the New York Times to sum up the state of climate science. Al Gore used a version of Mann’s...

Thank you also to all those who've made suggestions with respect to both the science and the law. The good advice I'm keeping close to my chest, the not-so-good ones we might publish here to throw Dr Mann's Big Tobacco lawyers off the scent. Speaking of the upcoming trial, Denyse O'Leary was a key part of the Internet pushback against Canada's squalid "human rights" commissions five years ago, and she has noted the banner above. Denyse has a post today about the Scopes Monkey Trial comparison, and writes: The choice of symbolism is interesting. The only thing one can be...

On this week's appearance on "The Hugh Hewitt Show", Hugh wanted to discuss the pitiful state of the Steyn-for-Senate campaign in New Hampshire. It was a real chest-baring session:

John Kerry played the same old card he always plays - Vietnam: I have to tell you, my friend, I've been, quote, attacked before - by people using real bullets, not words. This would be a pretty funny line from the characteristically tin-eared Kerry applied to almost anyone from the Belgian Deputy Tourism Minister on up. But it's especially hilarious directed at Mr Bennett, who's a veteran of two of Israel's toughest special-forces units and could undoubtedly kill the Secretary of State with his bare hands were he minded so to do.

I'm sure even now some New York Times type is tutting that Buckley's movement has fallen into the hands of vulgar bullies like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter who lack his dash and élan. As it happens, back in 2000 some fellow in the San Francisco Chronicle made exactly that point about a lout called Steyn disfiguring Buckley's National Review. But, in reality, Bill was, as he would say, the fons et origo of a conservatism that came out swinging — sometimes literally, as in a famous TV encounter of 1968. Bill Buckley would have fought this present battle with...

Speaking of "befuddled effete new-male eunuchs", "Climate Science Is For Sissies Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Well, okay, not quite. The actual headline is "Climate Science Is For Second-Raters Says World's Greatest Atmospheric Physicist". Our old pal James Delingpole is referring to MIT prof Richard Lindzen's testimony to the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee at Westminster this week. This exchange with the ghastly, condescending Tim Yeo was especially choice:

This column originally appeared in the January 27th print edition of National Review: America is a land of acronyms, and, useful as they are, acronyms can quickly curdle into jargon. SLAPP stands for "strategic lawsuit against public participation" — i.e., using legal action to cow an opponent into silence, and withdrawal from the public square. It was coined in the Eighties by Penelope Canan and George W. Pring at the University of Denver, and in the Nineties they turned it into a book: SLAPPs: Getting Sued for Speaking Out. And it proved so influential that by the Oughts various jurisdictions...

According to Rouillon, a sports science expert, the lesson to be learned from the preliminary results of his marathon experiment is that “bras are a false necessity”. Using a slide rule and caliper, Rouillon spent years carefully measuring changes in the orientation of breasts belonging to hundreds of women, at the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire (University Hospital) in Besançon. All the women involved in the study were aged between 18 and 35, although the professor was keen to stress that the group were not a representative of the global population of females.

Whenever there are tens of millions of dollars worth of lobbying muscle behind a piece of legislation, folks seem willing to say just about anything to make a case for it. The Marketplace Fairness Act, the misguided legislation to allow states to enforce their tax laws on out-of-state businesses, is but the latest example. Here are the top 10 bogus arguments in favor of the bill.

There is a bill working it’s way through the Senate that will tax internet sales transactions. President Obama has said he endorses the bill to raise taxes and will sign it. Before being “for” or “against” the bill using heuristics from your personal beliefs or talking points from the competing factions, it’s important to know what a government tax is. Put simply, it’s a hurdle or roadblock. If you want less of something, tax it. Taxes make marketplaces less efficient. Taxes are also a limit to personal freedom. Some see taxes as a revenue generator for government. But, governments can’t...

The Saturday afternoon call from Routh's sister, Laura Blevins, came from her home in Midlothian, some 30 miles southeast of Fort Worth, after Routh, she said, had come to visit her and her husband. "He's left now, but he told me that he's committed a murder, and I'm terrified for my life because I don't know if he's going to come back here," Blevins says in the call, her words spilling out in a torrent of worry. "I don't know if he's being honest with me." Asked for detail, she says, "He says that he killed two guys. They went...

If you can judge a political candidate by the enemies he makes, Texas Gov. Rick Perry stands pretty tall. For example, the national tort-lawyer lobby is set to spend millions to try to stop the GOP presidential hopeful in his tracks. snip “among litigators, there is no presidential candidate who inspires the same level of hatred — and fear — as Perry.”

In fact, fewer than 50 deaths could be directly attributable to radiation from the disaster, almost all of them among rescue workers who had been exposed to massive amounts of radiation on the disaster site at the time of the fire and its immediate aftermath. In addition, nine children in the area died of thyroid cancer that is thought to have been caused by radioactive contamination, but even among the nearby population, there was neither evidence of decreased fertility nor of congenital malformations that could be attributed to radiation exposure.

As Pawlenty prepares to run for the Republican nomination for president, his main problem is simple: Most Americans have never heard of him. Republicans tend to prefer known commodities: Every winner of the Republican nomination in the last 70 years had a national reputation a year before the primaries. Courage to Stand is not selling well. Yet Pawlenty may just be the Republicans’ strongest presidential candidate for 2012. Compared with his competitors, he is either more conservative, more electable, or both. Read the rest here http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/261416/pawlenty-ramesh-ponnuru?page=1

"Gitmo's Indefensible Lawyers" [Andy McCarthy] That's the title of of a mind-blowing op-ed by Debra Burlingame and Tom Joscelyn in Monday's Wall Street Journal. Debra and Tom make mince-meat of the hallucination that casts the Gitmo Bar as modern John Adamses. The essay recounts, among other things: The Gitmo Bar — in gross violation of the conditions of access to the enemy combatants — provided al Qaeda detainees with a propaganda brochure that instructed them on how falsely to claim that they had been tortured and abused. As the Gitmo commander put it, "The very nature of this document gives...

Girls, can we talk? I don’t really like piling on a man in the midst of a multi-million-dollar public and personal implosion, but here’s one big obvious lesson to be learned from Tiger Woods: Sex makes people stupid. And not just the men. How else do you explain the mistresses and semipros coming forward to say that a married Tiger betrayed their trust by sleeping with other women, too. Sex makes people stupid. This is why we need a little thing called “civilization” to intervene between people and sexual passion, so we don’t leave the young-uns to rely on their...

BOSTON — Massachusetts is suing the federal government over a law that defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman. State Attorney General Martha Coakley filed the lawsuit today in federal court in Boston. It says the federal Defense of Marriage Act interferes with the right of Massachusetts to define marriage as it sees fit.

The Kennedy-Dodd bill would create an individual mandate requiring you to buy a “qualified” health insurance plan, as defined by the government. If you don’t have “qualified” health insurance for a given month, you will pay a new Federal tax. Incredibly, the amount and structure of this new tax is left to the discretion of the Secretaries of Treasury and Health and Human Services (HHS), whose only guidance is “to establish the minimum practicable amount that can accomplish the goal of enhancing participation in qualifying coverage (as so defined).” The new Medical Advisory Council (see #3D) could exempt classes of...

Washington, DC - November 5, 2008 - President Elect Barack Obama and the Democrat controlled Congress is considering sweeping legislation that will provide new benefits for many Americans. The Americans With No Abilities Act. AWNAA is being hailed as a major legislative goal by advocates of the millions of Americans who lack any real skills or ambition. 'Roughly 50 percent of Americans do not possess the competence and drive necessary to carve out a meaningful role for themselves in society,' said California Senator Barbara Boxer. 'We can no longer stand by and allow People of Inability to be ridiculed and...

PENDLETON — According to Sheriff John Trumbo, Umatilla County spent $318,843 in tax dollars to house 360 illegal Mexican immigrants in its jail for crimes allegedly committed in the county during 2005.