Michael Fumento has been taking on the Hysteria Mongers for much of his writing career. His book "The Myth of Heterosexual Aids" debunked the political campaign to make the American public believe the risk of getting AIDS was widespread and deserving of the billions channeled to research for finding a "cure" when the "at risk" population was much much smaller.

History has proven him right.

Now, he takes on the global warmists. In the most recent Forbes he writes:

The cover of Al Gore's new book, Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis, features a satellite image of the globe showing four major hurricanes--results, we're meant to believe, of man-made global warming. All four were photoshopped. Which is nice symbolism, because in a sense the whole hurricane aspect of warming has been photoshopped.

Most interesting to me was Fumento's later reference to a 2005 "study" predicting much greater hurricane activity along America's coasts.

For many millions of American homeowners, the 2005 tempest tirade was hardly just academic. Half a year later, a company called Risk Management Solutions (RMS) issued a five-year forecast of hurricane activity predicting U.S. insured hurricane losses would be 40% higher than the historical average. RMS is the world leader in "catastrophe modeling," and insurance companies use those models to set premium rates charged to homeowners as well as by reinsurance companies and others.

With four years of data in, losses are actually running far below historical levels and at less than half the rate that RMS predicted. A lot of individuals and a lot of companies have grossly overpaid.

This made me recall one of the things Pennsylvania DEP boss John Hanger told the Daily Times editorial board this fall. Specifically, that insurance companies were increasing their rates due to evidence of global warming. It seems he was quite right, they were. But only because these insurance companies happily relied on this "study" that turned out to be incredibly WRONG!. The insurers profited mightily. Homeowners paid through the nose.

Hanger was brought to us by Rep. Greg Vitali who continues to push stricter state government mandates for more expensive "clean" energy. Here's my column about that meeting. I wish I'd known more about the RMS forecast and the gouging of the insurance-buying public at that time.

Shelby Steele's parable for Obama's America: The Emperor's New Clothes.

America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism.

Barack Obama, elegant and professorially articulate, was an invitation to sophistication that America simply could not bring itself to turn down. If "hope and change" was an empty political slogan, it was also beautiful clothing that people could passionately describe without ever having seen.

Good stuff.

And so is his comparing Obama to Reagan:

The nature of this emptiness becomes clear in the contrast between him and Ronald Reagan. Reagan reached the White House through a great deal of what is called "individuating"—that is he took principled positions throughout his long career that jeopardized his popularity, and in so doing he came to know who he was as a man and what he truly believed.

He became Ronald Reagan through dissent, not conformity. And when he was finally elected president, it was because America at last wanted the vision that he had evolved over a lifetime of challenging conventional wisdom. By the time Reagan became president, he had fought his way to a remarkable certainty about who he was, what he believed, and where he wanted to lead the nation.

Mr. Obama's ascendancy to the presidency could not have been more different. There seems to have been very little individuation, no real argument with conventional wisdom, and no willingness to jeopardize popularity for principle. To the contrary, he has come forward in American politics by emptying himself of strong convictions, by rejecting principled stands as "ideological," and by promising to deliver us from the "tired" culture-war debates of the past. He aspires to be "post-ideological," "post-racial" and "post-partisan," which is to say that he defines himself by a series of "nots"—thus implying that being nothing is better than being something. He tries to make a politics out of emptiness itself.

As usual, Steele insightfulness provokes and enlightens. But many of Obama's most "sophisticated" fans will continue to oooh and ahhh over their hero's "new clothes."

In the aftermath of the failed airline bombing attempt, Holman Jenkins doesn't think airport security is nearly as bad as everyone is saying.

Al Qaeda may be incapacitated, but its leaders aren't dumb. So what if their hapless messengers only embarrass themselves and burn their legs? Al Qaeda can still count on the sizeable damage we will inflict on ourselves through an airport security apparatus that specializes in expensive political displays of barn-door closing that seldom have any real security payoff.

Read it all.

Only 17 to 35 years for Worman?

At least he's serving it concurrently with the 120 years he got in his federal case.

Anyone who doubts that monsters live among us should read the details of his crimes.

This doesn't sound like your typical shooting.

Prediction: Father will do time. But charges will be significantly reduced.

Ross Douthat explains Obama. Pretty well, I think.

Krauthammer tries to remind Obama of his duty as the leader of the free world.

Fat chance!

Arrogant, Corrupt, Stupid. Merry Christmas!

From Bill, Anne, Isaiah and Andrea. My print column is up.

Don't you just hate people like this?

OK, maybe not.

Left-wing blogger and breast-cancer survivor Jane Hamsher comes out hard against the Democratic healthcare monstrosity.

Scroll down to check out her interview on Fox News.

Sen. Harry Reid: How much for your vote?
Sen. Ben Nelson: $100 million.
Sen. Harry Reid: Deal.
Sen. Ben Nelson: Sold.

The country's in the very best of hands.

Dawn Stensland-Mendte has written a letter to the editor claiming she is "disturbed" by the column I wrote about her prospective candidancy for Congress. I am sorry to hear it.

In her letter, Ms. Stensland-Mendte accuses me of a number of things including.

1. Not understanding the great difference between her qualifications for Congress and Elin Woods'.

2. Sexism.

3. Discouraging young women from running for public office.

4. And, worst of all, not being funny.

Let's go through it, shall we?

Ms. Stensland writes:

(Mr. Spencer) implied that Elin Woods and I would have similar qualifications because of our husbands. Putting aside the ridiculous comparison of an athlete who had a dozen mistresses and a TV anchor who had a flirtatious relationship at work...

I am perfectly willing to admit that this is something of a ridiculous comparison but I would argue that's what makes it kind of funny.

Of course, I never would have thought of it if she hadn't slyly encouraged a story about her running for office while the Tiger Woods bruhaha was in full bloom. Being embarrassed and cheated on by their husbands is something the famous Mrs. Woods and the locally famous out-of-work news anchor have in common.

It was particularly interesting how differently the two woman handled their husbands' betrayal.

According to the Philadelphia magazine story I cited (the one with which Ms. Stensland fully cooperated) she ignored all the signs of her husband's philandering, hoping he would come to his senses. He might have too. But then he got caught breaking the law, rifling through the private e-mails of the woman with whom he had this "flirtation" and went on to leak damaging details about her to a local newspaper.

Say what you will about Tiger Woods, but for all his philandering he didn't do anything that creepy. He didn't criminally attempt to ruin the careers of any of the girls with whom he slept.

Ms. Stensland told her husband's sentencing judge that her husband is a "good man" who did a bad thing. I'm willing to buy that. She knows him better than I do.

Still, about this "flirtation," Ms. Stensland claims to speak for "many women" when it comes her reaction to my column. I think I can speak for "many women" when it comes to her husband's "flirtation" as if that was all it was. They aren't buying it. And they think she is being either deliberately obtuse, woefully gullible, or lying when she makes such a claim.

Having said that, I admire her willingness to forgive and stand by her man. I think I made that clear at the end of the column Ms. Stensland found so objectionable.

I said her decency, loyalty and class made her unfit for Congress. That wasn't a slam against her. It was a slam against Congress, which, to my mind, is full of phonies, pimps, whores and back-biting power mongers.

To read that column was a slam against women suggests a weak but conscious-attempt to play the gender card. I thought Ms. Stensland was better than that. But then maybe she was just listening to one of her new political advisors. If so, she should get new ones.

Sounds like Brian Decker has an anger management problem exacerbated by a disintegrating marriage.

There is nothing more dangerous than a cop with with an AMP.

Ridley handled this one just right. Fast, fair and responsibly.

Now, let's see if the FOP understands that any attempt to reinstate Decker (even after supposed "treatment") will undermine public confidence in the police department and the township.

Stay tuned.

Ben and Mary sold theirs to Harry Reid and got a pretty price from the American taxpayer who got... well, an historic, trillion-dollar reorganization of the one-sixth of the U.S. economy to empower government, cut doctors' pay and enrich insurance companies.

The country's in the very best of hands.

Mark Steyn points out:

You can't even dignify this squalid racket as bribery: If I try to buy a cop, I have to use my own money. But, when Harry Reid buys a senator, he uses my money, too. It doesn't "border on immoral": It drives straight through the frontier post and heads for the dark heartland of immoral.

Megan McCardle on the Dems suicide march.

Thanks to them, more people will have health insurance but healthcare with be worse and rationed.

Michael Goodwin regrets voting for Barack Obama.

He's not alone.

Money Q:

Watching the freak show in Copenhagen last week, I was alternately furious and filled with dread. The world has gone absolutely bonkers and lunatics are in charge.

Mugabe and Chavez are treated with respect and the United Nations is serious about wanting to regulate our industry and transfer our wealth to kleptocrats and genocidal maniacs.

Even more frightening, our own leaders joined the circus. Marching to the beat of international drummers, they uncoupled themselves from the will of the people they were elected to serve.

President Obama, for whom I voted because I believed he was the best choice available, is a profound disappointment. I now regard his campaign as a sly bait-and-switch operation, promising one thing and delivering another. Shame on me.

A Chester grandmother has a Christmas wish.

My print column is up.

UPDATE: A few readers have already offered to help Anne's dream come true. Look for further updates next week.

Geno's Back.

My print column is up.

"Climate summit veering toward farce" and that's behind closed doors.

Outside, pro/Marxist protesters demonstrate for world regulation and the end of capitalism.

As for real farce, meet Carbie the Climate Clown over at Iowahawk.

There's nothing sadder than the tears of a Climate Clown.

Obama and his fellow Democrats say Democratic healthcare reform is about "history."

Yeah, theirs.

They have a long history of trying to impose "compulsory national health insurance" on the country and failing.

Now their loudest argument for passing this monstrous trillion-dollar, 2,000-page bill that a majority of the public is against, is this: 'If we they don't pass it, no Congress or president will attempt it again for a generation.'

There are common sense reforms that congres could impose; interstate sale of insurance, tort reform and portability. All three reforms would drive down costs but that's not what this is about. It's about government power and control of one-sixth of the American economy.

Is San Fran the "worst run big city in America?" SF Weekly makes the case.

David Harsanyi on the stonewalling climate scientists.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute -- one of those troglodyte-funded, big-screen-television-loving outfits -- was forced to file three notices of intent to file suit against NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, demanding the organization provide documents and raw data that were requested under the Freedom of Information Act three years ago.

Chris Horner, an attorney and senior fellow at CEI working on the NASA case, says of NCAR: "Without government, these jobs would not exist; that is a reasonable threshold test to determine whether documents should be available to the taxpayer."

Jeff Jacoby on a couple of the things missing from Obama's economic team: accuracy and humility.

Bob Powers put his life savings, $23,440, on the roof of his car and it blew away.

So what? There are more important things in life than money.

My print column is up.

As for the Eagles coming off a big win against the Giants and being 9-4, what Jack said.

Time to quit bitching and enjoy the ride for however long it lasts.

Nice that the county GOP hid their plans to impose a tax increase on county homeowners until AFTER the election. And nice that they have Linda Cartisano, who will safely be off council and wearing a black robe come January explaining how "unfair" it all is to the overtaxed public.

Nice and cynical too.

Why the government "backdating" prosecutions against businesses are going so badly: There wasn't a crime in the first place.

WSJ's Holman Jenkins has been trying to explain this to readers for years. At least the federal judges involved in these cases seem to get it.

UPDATE: For an example of how badly misunderstood these cases have been, check out this blogger post from Vindu Goel. He sounds like he knows what he's talking about but just read the comments from readers who obviously understand business and the law a lot better than Vindu does.

As for the criminal conviction Vindu cheerleads, that of Brocade CEO Greg Reyes, it was overturned on appeal for prosecutorial misconduct.

Is this the direction America should be going?

Welcome to the modern NHS maternity ward. A world of shoddy practice, poor hygiene standards and a shocking disregard for patients' individual needs.

When I read about newly qualified midwife Theresa Naish, who hanged herself in January after a premature baby died on her shift, I couldn't help wondering if she, too, was a victim of the over-worked and under-resourced labour wards I have experienced.

Max Boot and Lt. Col. William McCollough in Kabul, Afghanistan.

“I HOPE people who say this war is unwinnable see stories like this. This is what winning in a counterinsurgency looks like.”

A hard-throwing right-hander might just be under the Phillies Christmas tree.

More from Jack here.

Robert Samuelson explains the best way to health care reform is to first control costs then expand expand coverage.

The current Democratic plan doesn't do that. Go figure.

Eric Felton finds a number of female scribblers all too willing to share the intimate details of their marriages, especially their own disappointments in their sex lives.

Elizabeth Weil explained in the New York Times Magazine that she has chosen, for her memoir stunt, to march herself and her husband through all the varieties of modern marriage counseling. That gives her two tranches of material to talk about: (1) the various schools of couples therapy; and (2) the intimate details of her relationship with her husband, as revealed in all the therapeutic settings. But you do have to wonder how much Ms. Weil understands about what makes counseling, or relationships for that matter, work. One of the first psychoanalysts she and her husband visit starts their session by "closing a double set of soundproof doors." It's a nice, concrete expression of the private space needed for love and marriage to have a chance. Too bad Ms. Weil didn't get the hint.

Dr. Mark Green reflects on his night with Saddam Hussein, who was charming and chatty after his capture.

And then there was this:

For me, this was obviously a great opportunity for me to be part of history. When I think back, I can reflect on it this way: There was a murderous dictator ruling Iraq tyrannically and he’s no longer ruling Iraq. Now the people of Iraq have the opportunity to choose their own legacy. And if there is a legacy for American soldiers in Iraq, it is that Iraqis can choose their own destiny, where before they had no choice.

Whatever one thinks about that war the pride of men like Mark Green to have ended Saddam's tyranny is thoroughly justified.

Take the news quiz. My Sunday print column is up

Drivers in Delaware County need to be extra alert and cautious for the next five to 10 years.

17-year-old Mallory "Leadfoot" Spencer passed her driver's test at 2:45 p.m. this afternoon.

You've all been given FAIR WARNING!

Porn king Larry Flynt is suing his nephews for going into the porn business after he fired them.

Flynt accused his brother Jimmy Flynt's sons in federal court of tarnishing his image by launching Flynt Media Corp. and producing a series of videos he says are nothing but cheap knockoffs.

"The junk they publish hurts my reputation, which in turn hurts my revenue," the gruff, gravelly voiced porn king testified in U.S. District Court this week, where a Flynt family feud is playing out before a stone-faced jury and a no-nonsense judge.

Milos Foreman won an Academy Award for "The People Vs. Larry Flynt," which allegedly celebrated the First Amendment.

Sounds like it's time for a sequel. You know, to celebrate the Commerce Clause.

As promised, my print column is up.

The National Enquirer has nothing on Spencerblog.

Former TV news anchoress Dawn Stensland, wife of Larry Mendte, is thinking about entering the race for the 7th Congressional District seat.

Guess what? She isn't the only one.

Read all about it in tomorrow's Daily Times.

Dr. Barbara "Annie" Oakley takes a shot at the gatekeepers of the scientific establishment and scores a direct hit.

SPCA raises fees for taking in stray animals, municipalities go ape.

SPCA Volunteer Ed Ruggero gives a sound explanation for the fee increase in the comments section.

The "morrocco mole" comes up with his own very clever solution.

Here's a Washington Times editorial about the scandal surrounding "Safe Schools Czar" Kevin Jennings, formerly head of the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network. That it has to come with a lengthy content warning is not good news for Democrats or the Obama administration.

Home invasion has a happy ending: No one seriously hurt and a confession.

Oh yeah, and some cleaning services should do better background checks.

Thomas Frank criticizes critics of "The Chicago Way." In so doing, he rather quickly becomes one himself.

His problem is that be confuses the understood meaning of "The Chicago Way." It's not, as he says "power-grabbing, government-growing," it's the bare-knuckle fighting and their ham-fisted attempts to marginalize their political enemies. ("He puts one of your's in the hospital, you put one of his in the morgue That's the Chicago way!"

As a pundit, Frank is an expert at the practice.

Maybe that's what he really meant when he wrote his best seller, "What's The Matter With Kansas?" His fellow progressives in Jayhawk country hadn't learned "The Chicago Way."

This is just creepy. Urns in the likeness of your dead family member's face.

Actually, wouldn't it be better as a candy jar?

Hat tip: James Taranto

The Schoolhouse Center for senior citizens helps a member become an American citizen. My print column is up.

Hard to believe, killer Jerome Burgess does a decent thing.

THIS is Eugene Robinson's idea of "leaving Tiger alone"?

UPDATE: Golf writers discuss Tiger's future.

Interesting and thoughtful stuff.

Richard Epstein hoped his former collegue from the University of Chicago was the intelligent centrist his fans said he was.

He isn't. And neither are his appointees.

Exhibit A is Christina Romer's recent Wall Street Journal column, "Putting Americans Back to Work." Romer heads the president's Council of Economic Advisers. Her column rates as a bit of transparent propaganda that belongs in a fan magazine, not a serious newspaper. If she wrote it of her own volition, she should be fired for economic incompetence. If, as seems more likely, the White House wrote it for her, or told her just what to say, she should resign in protest.

Michael Fumento humbly suggests global warming scientists be a little more humble in their predictions when so many of them have proved wrong.

The Tiger story isn't amusing anymore. It's just gets sadder and sadder.

At Chester state prison the vending contract recently changed hands but the old vending company didn't hand out the change it owed inmates and staff. My Sunday print column is up.

Attorney General Eric Holder gets the support of the New Black Panther party when it comes to not investigating the New Black Panther party for voter intimidation.

Max Baucus nominates his girlfriend for U.S. Attorney in Montana.

Baucus spokesman Tyler Matsdorf said the relationship was not the cause of Baucus’ divorce and that Baucus did not arrange for her current position with DOJ.

“In no way was their relationship the cause of their respective divorces. When Senator Baucus and Melodee Hanes, his former state director, realized that their relationship was developing beyond a purely professional nature, Melodee began the process of resigning her Senate employment,” Matsdorf said.

“After withdrawing from consideration for U.S. Attorney, Ms. Hanes independently applied for her current position at the Department of Justice. Having extensive experience and qualifications in the field, Ms. Hanes was awarded the position based solely on her merit. Since then she has excelled in her role,” he added.

No doubt it was her qualifications as a terrific attorney that drew Sen. Baucas to her in the first place.

A whistleblower exposes Scientists Behaving Badly.

Slowly and mostly unnoticed by the major news media, the air has been going out of the global warming balloon. Global temperatures stopped rising a few years ago, much to the dismay of the climate campaigners. The U.N.'s upcoming Copenhagen conference--which was supposed to yield a binding greenhouse gas emissions reduction treaty as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol--collapsed weeks in advance and remains on life support pending Obama's magical intervention. Cap and trade legislation is stalled on Capitol Hill. Recent opinion polls from Gallup, Pew, Rasmussen, ABC/Washington Post, and other pollsters all find a dramatic decline in public belief in human-caused global warming. The climate campaigners continue to insist this is because they have a "communications" problem, but after Al Gore's Nobel Prize/Academy Award double play, millions of dollars in paid advertising, and the relentless doom-mongering from the media echo chamber and the political class, this excuse is preposterous. And now the climate campaign is having its Emperor's New Clothes moment.

Obama is losing Pennsylvania.

The math on Obamacare. It doesn't add up to good sense or good health.

Rex Murphy on Climategate.

Some are calling it Climaquiddick. It does have a better ring to it.

Broduer's is no longer on State Street in Media.

Dan Brodeur has closed up shop and allegedly owes the borough $30,000 in back rent. Borough Council President Frank Daly says they'll go after Brodeur for the back rent. Brodeur's supporters claim he was chased out of the building (the former borough hall) by borough officials who were too demanding and unrelenting in lease negotiations.

Borough officials made a bad move when they didn't simply sell the building to the highest bidder a few years ago. Now, they are stuck with a white elephant, at least for a while. Getting Trader Joe's to come to Media was a smart savvy move. Not getting $1 million for the borough hall property at the top of the real estate market was a dumb one.

Win some, lose some.

Is it unfair to say that Mario Civera is a phony and a liar when he said he would step down from his state rep job if he won a seat on county council?

No, it's not unfair. It's harsh but it's fair.

OK, so he's doing it for the sake of the county GOP machine. That doesn't make it any more honorable or palatable. He got the Daily Times endorsement for a county council seat in part because of his promise to step down from one office to hold the other. He isn't doing that, which means he's going back on his word.

We thought he was a better man than that. We were wrong.

Robert Samuelson on jobs.

Obama can't be fairly blamed for most job losses, which stemmed from a crisis predating his election. But he has made a bad situation somewhat worse. His unwillingness to advance trade agreements (notably, with Colombia and South Korea) has hurt exports. The hostility to oil and gas drilling penalizes one source of domestic investment spending. More important, the decision to press controversial proposals (health care, climate change) was bound to increase uncertainty and undermine confidence.

Alan Iverson weeps he is so happy to be back in Philadelphia.

He says he wants to retire as a Sixer. Are you buying it. For some reason, I am.

Tiger has put out a new statement about his "transgressions."

He talks about having let his family down but he denies that domestic violence had anything to do with his "car accident." So just how did such a strange accident occur? He doesn't say. I think he'll have to come up with some plausible explanation before all this is said and done.

Anyway, I win a doublecheese from my boss. This morning, I predicted a Tiger mea culpa within the week. It only took a few hours.

Allen's back. He's old, injury prone and still doesn't like to practice much.

He should put a few more fannies in the seats but he's hardly what the Sixers need improve, which based on what we've seen so far this season could take years.

Headline: Cops: Man beats girlfriend, tosses her from moving car.

I bet he played football in high school, not golf.

Frank J. has incriminating excerpts from the purloined Climategate e-mails.

Like this one:

“One of the denialists found out that the data for my conclusive proof of global warming was corrupted because cats like to lay on the temperature sensors. We may need to redefine “peer review” to keep his paper from being published. Also, when in science is it okay to murder?”

I'm not sure, but I think Frank J. is just making this stuff up. You be the judge.

Tiger's in trouble, man.

I have some advice for him in today's print column. I'm not saying it's necessarily good advice. But it's at least as good as the advice he's been getting recently.

Local candidates for national office weigh in on Obama's 30,000-soldier surge and timetable to leave Afghanistan. Says Sen. Arlen Specter:

“It is unrealistic to expect the United States to be out in 18 months, so there is really no exit strategy. This venture is not worth so many American lives or the billions it will add to our deficit.”

Democrats are always talking about "exit strategies" when it comes to war, never winning them.

Says Rep. Joe Sestak:

"If we leave al-Qaeda behind in a safe haven and are struck again, what can we ever say to those we swore to protect? From the outset of this debate, I have called for a strategy that is focused on al-Qaeda in Pakistan, is not overly dependent on nation-building in Afghanistan and is not open-ended. The president stated similar goals.”

The president was all over the map, trying to be the responsible leader of the free world while trying to placate the irresponsible anti-war left wing of his party with an announced 2011 time-table for withdrawal.

Congressional candidate Bryan Lentz said:

“And the objective of the timetable is not the enemy, the objective is the people and the leaders of Afghanistan,” Lentz said. “They need to have a motivation, they need to know our assistance and our soldiers fighting (will) not go on forever. At some point, they have to stand up, and nothing motivates like knowing there’s a deadline approaching.”

Hard to imagine FDR or Lincoln announcing time-tables for WWII or the Civil War to end.

And finally, former Specter chief of staff, Pat Meehan running for Sestak's vacated seat:

The Afghanistan government does not, at this point in time, have anywhere near the security forces trained and capable of containing the insurgency as it currently presents itself, and their is a plan to turn that over, but it will require real commitment from the (Afghani President Hamid) Karzai government to enable that to happen. The challenge is going to be holding them accountable to doing so.

“He’s (Obama) ultimately created a point in which the determination would be made by conditions on the ground. I do think there was a resolute tone in his presentation, which should send a signal, but the insurgents are waiting to see the degree of genuine commitment and that is going to be only understood over time and with success.”

The problem wasn't in the President's tone. It was the process over which he publicly agonized and dithered over the decision for months. It's impossible to know how resolute he is. And when the going gets tough in six months or a year, when casualties start to mount and his fellow Democrats start to demand immediately withdraw, we'll see how resolute our Commander in Chief is.

Another woman, a Vegas cocktail waitress is now claiming she had an affair with Tiger Woods too. Meanwhile, Rachel Urchitel is trashing one of the National Enquirer's sources for its story on the alleged affair between Tiger and her.

Who to believe? The National Enquirer or Rachitel. I'm going with the rag.
They got the John Edwards story right, despite everybody's denials. The former Vice Presidential candidate even got a flunkie named Andrew Young to claim paternity of his love child.

Too bad Tiger didn't think to get his caddy Steve Williams to claim the relationship with Rachitel. But then, that's an incredibly sleazy thing to do, more fitting for a ambulance chaser like Edwards.

More tomorrow, including my advice to Tiger in my print column.

Claudia Rosett explains why we'd be fools to trust the U.N. when it comes to global warming (or anything else for that matter)

On the basis of calculations performed deep within the entrails of UN bureacracies that thrive these days by attributing the world’s troubles to climate and then allocating blame, penalties, bonanzas and UN commissions on the basis of the IPCC “scientific consensus,” this same UN climate Gateway web page informs us that “Seven of ten disasters are climate related.” To fix this, the UN tells us, we need only trust to the UN’s guidance. That would be the same UN that not so long ago dealt with its own propensity for corruption by disbanding its anti-corruption task force; the same UN that once claimed Oil-for-Food was the most heavily audited program it had ever run; the same UN that can’t tally its own global budget.

Read the whole thing.

Another reason to stay out of Philadelphia.