Chris Mooney provides yet more proof that the EPA's recently-announced carbon emissions limits won't "cost too much." Long story short: cost estimates tend to be hysterically overblown. Long story somewhat longer: cost estimates also tend not to count benefits, like reduced health care costs. In a related development, corporate members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce are not exactly rushing to support the Chamber's doomsaying.
Commander at a training camp for terrorists in Iraq accidentally blows himself up, along with almost two dozen pupils. You wish they were all that stupid, but you know they're not -- as too many of Iraq's citizens know better than we do.
Tarrance Group poll finds Republican Alex Mooney leading Democrat Nick Casey by 10 points in West Virginia's second district, currently held by Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, now running for that state's open U.S. Senate seat. But that's not the most surprising finding: the Libertarian candidate gets 6 points, but a candidate running well to Mr. Casey's left, ex-CBS reporter Ed Rabel, gets 10. Populism: it really does work everywhere.
Oliver North demands to know whether President Obama paid "a ransom, a fiscal, financial, money transaction" to the Taliban to get Bowe Bergdahl back from Afghanistan. That's right, it's Oliver North, hoping you've forgotten all about that arms-to-Iran-for-hostages thing. No truth to the rumor that he also demanded to know if the transaction was pecuniary or remunerative.
UC-San Diego researchers figure out how to erase and restore memories in rats. I guess I'd be appalled if I were more impressed -- a rat learned, "forgot," and "re-learned" how to fear having certain optic nerves stimulated, which hardly compares to the multitudinous ways we willingly erase and transform memories.
Finally, a Dutch corporation has apparently developed a small, almost-silent wind turbine that could be combined with a solar power array to take the average American home completely off the grid. Well before then, of course, the coal corporations will have come up with a wind tax to go with the sun tax they're trying to make everyone pay. Such is the price of progress, I suppose -- not that it should make us shun progress.
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