Free Republic

BALI, Indonesia - More than 3,000 flying foxes dropped dead, falling from trees in Australia. Giant squid migrated north to commercial fishing grounds off California, gobbling anchovy and hake. Butterflies have gone extinct in the Alps. While humans debate at U.N. climate change talks in Bali, global warming is already wreaking havoc with nature. Most plants and animals are affected, and the change is occurring too quickly for them to evolve. "A hell of a lot of species are in big trouble," said Stephen E. Williams, the director of the Centre for Tropical Biodiversity & Climate Change at James Cook...

No single act or piece of legislation by itself created the pension crisis that threatens to overwhelm the state and many local governments in California. The pension mess stems from a series of bad decisions, of fiscally reckless votes (many of them self-serving) in the Legislature, in city councils and county boards of supervisors. Still, in the state's downward spiral into a deep hole of pension debt, the passage of SB 2465 more than a decade ago stands out. On the last night of the 1990 legislative session, the innocuous contents of SB 2465 were gutted on the Assembly floor...