Hillary: That's Right! I Wear the Pants!

The Hillary Clinton for President campaign has released a truly bizarre spoof of the rightly derided Sopranos finale.

Hillary fills the shoes of Tony Soprano, a mob boss who never met a vice he wouldn't indulge, who's only redeeming qualities are success and a xenophobic form of patriotism. Bill plays the role of the long suffering wife, Carmela Soprano, who is willing to turn a blind eye to just about anything in order to continue her ritzy lifestyle.



Knowing that a campaign that will cost hundreds of millions of dollars to complete would never do anything just for fun (particularly an anything that would have taken a fair bit of valuable candidate time and money), I thought long and hard about why they would invite a rehash of Whitewater by comparing Hillary to Tony Soprano. The only reasonable explanation I have come up with is that Hillary wanted to demonstrate that Bill is the lesser party in their relationship, hopefully removing some of the focus from him.

But then I found out that her official campaign song is going to be a miserable Celine Dion tune. While ridiculously successful, Dion is absolutely hated by everyone that isn't a die hard fan. And she's Canadian.

The Hillary campaign is on crack. At this rate Hillary is going to get less of the popular vote than her husband did, and this time there's no Ross Perot running to help her out.

CAIR Memberships In Nose Dive After 9/11

The Washington Times is reporting that CAIR's membership numbers have declined by an order of magnitude since 2000.

According to tax documents obtained by The Times, the number of reported members spiraled down from more than 29,000 in 2000 to less than 1,700 in 2006, a loss of membership that caused the Muslim rights group's annual income from dues to drop from $732,765 in 2000, when yearly dues cost $25, to $58,750 last year, when the group charged $35.

The organization instead is relying on about two dozen individual donors a year to contribute the majority of the money for CAIR's budget, which reached nearly $3 million last year.

It's worth bearing in mind that everytime you read a quote from CAIR you can be almost certain that they only exist because of Saudi backers.

News like this almost makes me feel like my pessimism about Islam is unjustified...

Saving the Earth Through... Strip Mining?

Or, the law of unintended consequences strikes again.

The latest issue of Synergy - Journal of UBC Science has an article (page 4) about using mine tailings to absorb carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere.

The highlight is that for every ten million tonnes of hardrock tailings, one million tonnes of CO2 can be sequestered, which is ten times the amount needed to make a mining operation "carbon neutral". The article represents a typical mine as being a "ten-million-tonne-per-year tailing operation".

Wikipedia lists Canada as producing 500 million tonnes of CO2 per year, meaning that a single mine could absorb roughly 2% of our emissions. While I can't find any great mining statistics, I have to assume that we have a lot of mines, and that more than a few of those fall under the hardrock category...

The mine owners themselves are pretty excited, as they suddenly have another another marketable product (emissions credits) to sell. And if anyone takes Kyoto seriously you can imagine governments deciding to increase the number of mines allowed in order to meet commitments.