Spindletime: Obama’s Lame Duckface, and Other Follies

It’s been another terrible, no good, very bad week for the left, and it isn’t over yet.  We could still get another Democrat or trade union running for cover over the disaster that is the unfolding of Obamacare.  We certainly haven’t seen the last of the left’s bitter clingers complaining about the four Democratic Senators who extended their own right of self-preservation to the rest of us by voting down the gun bill.  Obama’s outburst yesterday wins the Oscar for the Most Petulant Performance by a President since Woodrow Wilson went off on Republican senators in 1917: “A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”  And we know how that story turned out for Wilson.

And remember how Dept. of Homeland Security Secretary Janet “The System Worked” Napolitano tried to rebrand terrorism as “man-caused disasters” in the early innings of the Obama regime?  I’d love to see her try that one again this week.  Meanwhile, remember how the New York Times featured Bill Ayers on September 11, 2001 saying he regretted having not engaged in more domestic terrorist activity?  Well, the Los Angeles Times tried to complete with the NY Times on Monday, with this headline and story: “With Al Qaeda Shattered, U.S. Counter-Terrorism’s Future Unclear.”

Lost in the shuffle this week is what appears to be the rout if not total collapse of the cornerstone of Europe’s climate change policy—it’s much vaunted carbon trading system.  On Tuesday the European Parliament voted down a last-ditch attempt to prop up the failing carbon trading system.  As the Wall Street Journal put it yesterday: “One of the great policy bubbles of our times has been cap and trade for carbon emissions, and on Tuesday It may have popped for good. . . When even Europe recognizes the folly of artificially raising energy prices, the anticarbon obsessives have lost in their own climate-change temple.”

During the debate over the measure on Monday, UKIP Party rep Godfrey Bloom had fun taunting the “denialists” of the current pause in global warming—this one-minute clip is worth a look:

Also be sure to savor this Reuters story about how scientists are “struggling” to explain the current lack of warming.  Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency in Paris is out with a report yesterday showing that despite nearly $2 trillion in investment in “clean” energy in recent years, there’s been no progress in reducing the carbon intensity of the world’s energy supply.  As the IEA’s executive director told The Guardian:

“Despite much talk by world leaders, and a boom in renewable energy over the past decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago.”

How do you spot climatefail?  Like this:

The IEA said that coal-fired generation grew by 45% between 2000 and 2010, far outpacing the 25% growth in non-fossil fuel generation over the same period.

I’ll have an article in the Weekly Standard out this Saturday that surveys the climate and energy beat.  Stay tuned. . .

Meanwhile, that MENSA member John Kerry has struck again.  Today he referred to the Boston Red Sox adopted theme song “Sweet Caroline” as “Sweet Adeline.”  We can file that next to his rendering of “Lambert Field” in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and the “Yoo-cah” Mountain nuclear waste site in Nevada.  (But that would be “Ne-VAH-da” to Kerry anyway.)

One last item, to follow up on my notice of the passing of Jonathan Winters the other day.   A lot of people, including Robin Williams in the New York Times, recall Winters’ extraordinary improvisations with a stick on the Jack Parr show back in the early 1960s.  Here it is:

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