Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:
Hate Speech?
The Supreme Court has been asked to reverse rulings that found the terms "marriage," "natural family," and "union of a man and woman" can be punished as hate speech in government workplaces.
The Washington Times reports the phrases were in a flyer distributed by city employees in Oakland, California. The flyers were in response to a homosexual group that was allowed to post promotional material on the city's e-mail system.
But a lesbian co-worker complained she felt "targeted" and "excluded" by the flyers — which the city ordered removed. The authors of the flyer sued, claiming discrimination, and lost.
The group representing the women who wrote the flyers says the rulings have silenced hundreds who simply wish to talk about marriage and family values.
Biofuel "Scam"
One of the British government's senior science advisers says the government's plan to promote biofuels as a way to counter global warming is a scam.
The Sunday Times reports Surrey University Environmental Technology Professor Roland Clift says the campaign will actually increase greenhouse gas emissions. He says the deforestation that results from the clearing of land to grow the biofuel crops produces more carbon dioxide than the biofuels will offset.
Clift also criticizes plans to use the crop rapeseed because research says it generates high levels of nitrous oxide — which is an even more powerful global warming gas than carbon dioxide.
Widely Disavowed
No one has ever established that he actually said it and experts widely disavow it — but Al Gore still used a famous purported quote by Abraham Lincoln in his new book.
Gore writes that the growth of corporate power escalated after the Civil War and quotes Lincoln as saying: "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."
Experts widely dismiss the quote as false — but it remains a favorite of liberal bloggers.
Author Andrew Ferguson writes in The Washington Post it has been traced back to the 1880's — about 20 years after Lincoln's death. He says Lincoln's own son denounced it as "an imprudent invention," that reflected views his father never held.
Intimate Moment
And people feeling sad about the supposed impending demise of Europe's largest glacier due to global warming can now get what is being called a "one-to-one beautiful and intimate moment" with the glacier.
Scottish artist Katie Paterson has set up a phone line over which you can hear the sounds of the icy waters that supposedly are absorbing the Vatnajokull glacier.
Paterson says she came up with the idea during a visit to Iceland — when she drank glacier water while suffering from fever-induced hallucinations — an act that made her feel part of the glacier. So she dropped a microphone into the lagoon and patched it into a phone line which you can call — and be advised international calling rates do apply.
Also — only one person at a time can get through — and that's in order to preserve that intimacy with the glacier.
—FOX News Channel's Martin Hill contributed to this report.
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