After a year of concentrated effort that includes a multimillion-dollar p.r. campaign on top of An Inconvenient Truth and slavish media coverage parroting the climate-alarmist line, recent polls show that public opinion on global warming has barely budged. Only about a third of Americans, according to a recent Gallup survey, are agitated about climate change, and even people who say the environment is their most important issue rank climate change behind air and water quality in importance.

Meanwhile a backlash in the scientific community has begun. New York Times veteran science reporter William Broad filed a devastating article about scientists who are “alarmed” at Gore’s alarmism; Gore’s account of global warming goes far beyond the evidence. The dissents from Gore’s extremism, Broad explained, “come not only from conservative groups and prominent skeptics of catastrophic warming, but also from rank-and-file scientists” who have “no political ax to grind.” It appears Gore refused to be interviewed directly for the article; he responded to e-mail questions only.

This business about Pakistan being our ally is abject nonsense. Most of the country despises us. Musharraf and some of the military have been a fickle ally but they did at least occasionally take the fight to al Qaeda and the Taliban. They didn't do it with abandon, though, precisely because (a) the people of Pakistan oppose it(they are fine with having anti-Western jihadists operating from safe-havens within their country), and (b) Pakistan has always been a strong supporter of the Taliban (which Benazir Bhutto was key to establishing in Afghanistan) for both cultural and geopolitical reasons.

If the rationale for continuing American combat operations in Iraq is, principally, that we cannot allow anti-Western radicals to establish a platform from which they can launch 9/11-style operations, how can we conceivably turn a blind eye to the platform they have in fact established in Pakistan's border region? Try as it might, international law has not (yet) repealed the sovereign right of self-defense. We are not required by anything so vapid as "our standing in the world" to tolerate an al Qaedastan in Pakistan, Iraq, Somalia, or anyplace else.

A self-described revolution in world affairs has begun in the heart of one man. He is the Italian journalist and author Magdi Cristiano Allam, whom Pope Benedict XVI baptized during the Easter Vigil at St Peter's. Allam's renunciation of Islam as a religion of violence and his embrace of Christianity denotes the point at which the so-called global "war on terror" becomes a divergence of two irreconcilable modes of life: the Western way of faith supported by reason, against the Muslim world of fatalism and submission.

As Magdi Allam recounted, on his road to conversion the challenge that Pope Benedict XVI offered to Islam in his September 2006 address at Regensburg was "undoubtedly the most extraordinary and important encounter in my decision to convert". Osama bin Laden recently accused Benedict of plotting a new crusade against Islam, and instead finds something far more threatening: faith the size of a mustard seed that can move mountains. Before Benedict's election, I summarized his position as "I have a mustard seed and I'm not afraid to use it." Now the mustard seed has earned pride of place in global affairs.  

coincidence that Democrats chose Denver for their convention. When they converge on the Mile High City in five months, they'll be staking their claim to what was once a solidly Red region. The Republicans have one hope - at least, for a four-year reprieve:Hillary Clinton. While the Democrats as a party are building strength out West, polls consistently show that Clinton has little appeal to Independents and Republicans in the region. Survey USA did a 50-state, 30,000-person poll earlier this month, looking at the electoral map for hypothetical McCain-Clinton and McCain-Obama races. It showed that New Mexico is likely to tilt Democratic no matter what this fall - and Barack Obama could pick up Colorado and Nevada rather handily (by 9 and 5 points, respectively). But Hillary would lose Colorado by 6 points and Nevada by 8 points. This is just one poll, taken months ahead of the election, but it certainly jibes with past polls by Survey USA and recent polling by Rasmussen. It certainly wouldn't be the first time the Clintons helped keep the Republican coalition together (see: 1994). But until Chelsea's old enough to throw her hat in the ring, it would probably be the l

The choice before the Supreme Court is clear. It should respect international law and recognize Iraq's sovereign right to try and punish criminal defendants within its own territory. The U.S. has chosen not to seek (as a diplomatic matter) special treatment for these individuals because of their American citizenship, a decision properly within the executive branch's discretion. Even if the Court concludes that it has jurisdiction to consider the habeas petitions, it should reject them and let Shawqi Ahmad Omar (a dual U.S./Iraqi national) and Mohammad Munaf (a dual U.S./Jordanian national) have their day in the Iraqi courts. 

Bill Veeck, who did more for America in one night than most of us do in a lifetime (the night in September 1937 he planted the ivy along Wrigley Field's outfield walls), said that the great thing about baseball -- aside from the fact that you do not need to be 7 feet wide or 7 feet tall in order to play it -- is: Three strikes and you're out, and the best lawyer can't help you. Baseball, which provides satisfying finality and then does it again the next day, is a severe meritocracy that illustrates the axiom that there is very little difference between men but that difference makes a big difference.

Undoubtedly, being stop-lossed has to suck something fierce, and I feel for the thousands pulled from their lives and loved ones for a contractual obligation they’re well aware of but probably never imagined would be brought to life. But they deserve better than this. Stop-Loss is Exhibit A -- no, D -- no, J in the case proving Hollywood can’t stand the troops. This insistent portrayal of these men and women as unstable and dangerous -- dehumanized and psychotic -- is outright stereotyping and the building of a stigma. It’s a monstrous act performed by these filmmakers and yet they remain undeterred even by box-office humiliation in their cruel objective to lose a war by tearing down our finest.

What’s wrong with Fox News for these folks?

Not unlike their counterparts way over to starboard, these principal players in the lefty blogosphere are ideological warriors, hyperpartisans who offer little if any quarter in their political jihads. They want their chosen party, the Democratic Party, to do what they want it to do. But most professional Democrats regard the lefty blogosphere, which styles itself as the netroots, as distinguished from the traditional grassroots, as an angry constituency that doesn’t necessarily see the bigger picture.

They put a particularly post-modern spin on their crusades, focusing on the need to change “the media narrative” about events in order to influence those events. To win reality, in this view, you must redefine reality. Others in politics believe that in order to win in politics, you work in the reality that exists.

Anybody who lives in Sydney knows that Earth Hour was a monumental flop. Sydney did not plunge into darkness. It was a little bleaker than normal but still not quite as bleak as living in, say, Melbourne. In parks around Sydney, children could be heard chanting: “Turn them off!” long after the Great Switch Off had apparently begun. In the CBD, lights dimmed a little when the logos on the buildings went out. Most companies were too terrified to keep their logos burning during Earth Hour but what are the chances that Coca Cola will permanently give up its billboards? It’s absurd.

A decade ago, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and other legislative strongmen had choked the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) into near-submission. Nearly 40 states banned mixed martial arts events. The cable industry, over which McCain exercised considerable influence as the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, took note too. In 1997 TCI and Time Warner stopped carrying UFC pay-per-view events on their systems. Semaphore Entertainment Group, the company that produced UFC, nearly went bankrupt.

When he attacked the UFC, McCain never pushed for reform; he wanted to eliminate it entirely. But despite its initial image of lawless, bone-crunching mayhem, the UFC ultimately proved quite capable of policing itself. Apparently, the public’s interest in the fights was not as base as McCain had perhaps imagined. Today, the UFC is a sanitized, bureaucratized, more genteelly marketed version of its former self, yet it’s also more popular than ever. As much as we like violence, we apparently like it even more when it’s tempered by a senseof order.