My general doctor made the front page of the Register on Thursday, and I knew about it before it was going to happen. On Wednesday I visited my primary care doctor, Michael Fitzgibbons. Of all the doctors I've seen in my life he is, by far one of the best. He takes the time to explain what's going on and why. Anyway, last year he was arrested because a gun was found in his car. The charges were quickly dismissed as the Santa Ana police believed that the gun was planted. There's now a lawsuit filed by Dr. Fitzgibbons and other doctors against the man they believe planted the gun. I happened to be in his office when he got the phone call from his attorney, and he was grinning from ear-to-ear when he got the call. The story in the paper looks like something out of a cheap novel, with the following alleged action:

Mogel used $10,000 in company funds to arrange for a gun and a pair of black gloves to be put in Fitzgibbons' car, where the police found them. IHHI had sued Fitzgibbons for defamation after he complained publicly about conditions at Western Medical. Fitzgibbons won the lawsuit after the state Court of Appeals ruled that IHHI had tried to silence him.

Anyway, I can understand why he was in a very good mood as I left his office.

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Nat Hentoff, an op-ed writer for the Sacramento Bee, wrote an interesting op-ed about why he's disillusioned about Barack Obama. Here's his conclusion:

But Obama insists this program will be the "moral center" of his administration. Just where is his own center of credibility? I remember the surge of hope for a national change as a child, during the Great Depression, when, while my mother would walk blocks to save a few cents on food, there came Franklin Delano Roosevelt! I haven't seen such a surge since Obama's first chorus, but I can no longer believe in this messenger of such tidings.

Thomas Sowell has an op-ed noting the reality of Obama. Will history repeat itself?

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"Time Publishes Definitive Obama Puff Piece" -- The Onion is there.

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I'm ending today with probably the most important piece of the day. Dr. David Evans was the man responsible for Australia's efforts in combating global warming from 1999 - 2005. He now believes that:

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Some more highlights:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

If there is no hot spot then an increased greenhouse effect is not the cause of global warming. So we know for sure that carbon emissions are not a significant cause of the global warming. ...

2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. ...

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980). ...

4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect. ...

The last point was known and past dispute by 2003, yet Al Gore made his movie in 2005 and presented the ice cores as the sole reason for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. In any other political context our cynical and experienced press corps would surely have called this dishonest and widely questioned the politician's assertion. ..

He concludes by noting that if Australia's Labor government wrecks the economy by reducing carbon emissions the likelihood is that Australia won't elect a Labor government anytime soon thereafter. Read the piece.
I remain convinced that we need to worry a lot more about global cooling rather than global warming.

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Off to Las Vegas tomorrow morning, so the next update here will likely be in early August.

"It could not have passed a polygraph test....I mean, coming up with this bogus argument the Republicans have so much more money — the Republicans don’t have so much more money. He’s raised three times as much as John McCain has."--Mark Shields on NPR.

"I do think it’s the low point of the Obama candidacy, and I think it for this reason...And so for him to betray this, to sell out this issue, what won’t he sell out?"-- David Brooks.

"

Of the editorial boards that opined Friday about his breaking the pledge, most of those that endorsed him during the primary were aggressive in their criticism.

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s called the decision “as disappointing as it is disingenuous,” while the Boston Globe’s wrote it “deals a body blow … to his own reputation as a reform candidate.” And The Baltimore Sun’s editorial called it “a major disappointment for those struggling to restrain the pernicious influence of special interests in American politics.”--Kenneth Vogel of Politico.

Will editorial boards actually endorse a Republican candidate over Obama? I doubt it. But Obama is trying to have it both ways, and he's unlikely to succeed.

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Speaking of having it both ways, Obama announced this past week that he will support the FISA bill in the Senate. Now he says that he will support a filibuster, and will attempt to strip the telecom retroactive immunity portion from the bill. (As a practical matter the bill will likely pass, as the telecom bill with explicit immunity provisions garnered 68 yes votes earlier this year.)

So does Obama support this bill or not? Can he take a single position on an issue and stick with it? Or are all of his positions will-o-the-wisps, to change based on which way he feels the air is blowing on a daily basis?

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Interesting article on health care: Let Wal-Mart fix our health care system.

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More ice on the global warming parade. And for evwhore and any others who want to say see "nxy", sorry--the graph (above) comes from Antarctic ice core samples, from the Vostok (Russian) research facility. It's only 400,000 years of data--is that not enough?

Al Gore believes that global warming is caused by humans, and his film, An Inconvenient Truth, plays on our fears.

However, are we to blame? In the United Kingdom, Channel 4 presented its own documentary, The Great Global Warming Swindle. I've just watched it, and I think you should too. You can watch it here.

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Now, on to tax returns....