Now some fresh pickings from the Political Grapevine:
Global Warming
An American researcher is threatening to sue NASA over its alleged distortion of climate change data. This follows revelations that scientists at a British university have changed or destroyed similar information.
Christopher Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, believes NASA manipulated temperature information to support its claim that the present decade is the warmest on record: "They don't want to admit the trend. It's cooling and they're trying not to say that.... When you talk about temperatures this decade and compare them to 1885, where were we measuring the temperature in 1885?"
Despite the escalating controversy over climate change data since the British e-mail story broke 13 days ago, the major broadcast networks have not covered it on their morning or evening news shows according to Media Research Center, even with President Obama heading to a climate change summit in Copenhagen next week.
Tax on Fatty Foods
From our Stimulus Dollars at Work file: Will increasing your taxes trim your waistline? That's what the federal government is spending $1 million in stimulus money to find out.
The government has awarded a grant to the University of Illinois at Chicago to study the relationship between fat taxes and food consumption. The university says previous studies suggest a correlation between food prices and consumption. But some experts say consumers will just buy alternative high-sugar drinks like Kool-Aid if their favorite soda gets too expensive.
Researchers at the Illinois Policy Institute say that if that's the case, a tax will not have any impact on diet quality or weight reduction, adding about the stimulus expenditure: "Taxpayers are in essence funding a study that will likely call for even higher taxes on the products we consume every day. This isn't change we can believe in."
Wrong number
Florida parents applying for children's health insurance got more than they bargained for recently when their calls to Governor Charlie Crist's office for "Kid Care" directed them to a phone sex chat line.
For some reason, that number has actually appeared in several publications, including the West Palm Beach report on water quality, a Medicare information line in Pittsburgh and a toll-free line in Virginia that notifies residents when a sex offender moves into their neighborhood.
Crist's office says it has corrected the problem.
— Fox News Channel's Megan Dumpe Kenworthy contributed to this report.
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